Having three children, Jodell Plavak knows the demands placed on parents when it comes to back-to-school shopping. Luckily, the lists haven't changed that much for her family.

But as a volunteer, she has helped others find school supplies on their list for at least the past four years. And that's where she notices the difference. Schools are asking parents more and more to buy things they once provided for students: protractors, rulers, compasses, graph paper. Most require specific brands and colors of various supplies.

For cash-strapped families it isn't necessarily fair, she said. But Plavak is also a teacher and understands the limited budgets they face, as districts rein in money once budgeted for classroom supplies.

"I understand if a teacher says they need a hand with extra white-board markers," Plavak said. "When education was first implemented, it was supposed to be free and appropriate. Now, no school around here is without fees, and you add that to the cost of school supplies. It's hitting parents rather hard - the amount they are being asked to put out for public education."

She has two children in high school in Riverdale. There, the lists haven't changed that much. But she's seen it in the districts where she has taught and through volunteer work at Wal-Mart, trying to help parents find the items on their child's back-to-school lists.

Some parents say schools don't necessarily want them to buy more. It's the supplies on the lists that have changed. There are tennis balls, markers for the dry erase board, reams of copy paper, bandages, disinfecting wipes, activity books and even shaving cream.

Top that off with other necessities, such as backpacks, notebooks and the school fees districts charge, and parents say it costs upward of $150 to send just one child back to the classroom.

However, leaders in some local school districts say they have tried to ease the burden on parents in recent years.

Educators in the Moline-Coal Valley School District worked to pare their school supply lists this year because of the tough economy. Bettendorf created a common list for all its elementary schools and took some items off that officials decided the district should provide. Among them were hand sanitizer and Kleenex, said Celeste Miller, spokeswoman for the Bettendorf School District.

The Davenport School District has a common list for all elementary schools, but it varies at intermediate buildings. There have been few changes in recent years, said Laura Bozarth, spokeswoman for the district.

"Every year, the principal of each building works with staff members to put together a list of supplies," said Deb Singlely, Moline-Coal Valley assistant superintendent for curriculum. "This year, they reviewed it with the economy in mind. It's a suggested list. They aren't checked at the door to see who brought what."

Instead, schools try to make the unpacking process as discreet as possible. If teachers see a student who doesn't have materials, they quietly take them to a closet of donated school supplies, where they can find everything they need, area educators said.

Some families are targeted ahead of time, based on their child's free and reduced-price lunch status. If students are considered low-income and participate in the meal program, most schools invite them to come in before school starts to pick out free supplies from their donated stock.

"More and more people are moving to our area with the hope that there are better and more jobs in our area," said Barbara Jordan, Bettendorf outreach coordinator. "Many of them are coming with very little in the way of what we would expect a family to have ... Do I anticipate the need will be even greater this year? I do. But how much greater, I don't know."

Jordan said in one day she received five calls from schools in the Bettendorf district with officials requesting supplies for needy families. In one hour, three families called her directly. She said, so far, demand is about double what it was at this time last year.

School districts in the Quad-Cities collaborate with each other and the U.S. Postal Service to run a drive for donated school supplies before the start of each school year. They request the basics: notebooks, colored pencils, folders, pens, crayons, backpacks, pencils, glue sticks, erasers and rulers. That's in addition to dry erase markers, hand sanitizer, Kleenex and watercolor paints.

People give the supplies to their specific district, which then distributes them to individual schools. Typically, how much a building receives depends on its population of poor children, officials said.

Despite the economy, some area districts, such as Moline-Coal Valley and Rock Island-Milan, have seen a record number of donations. Figures are up in Davenport as well, Bozarth said. The district has collected 64,983 supplies, with more still coming in each day. That's compared to 55,078 last year.

However, that hasn't been the case for all school districts.

Miller said Bettendorf has slightly fewer donations so far this year compared to last year. But the real drop came the previous year, when the district received 22,419 items, or 10,813 fewer than the 2007-08 school year.

"We are thinking it had something to do with the economy," Miller said.

That's what kept Lori Kane from donating this year. The mother of two Davenport students used to spend about $10 each summer buying extra supplies to give to the school district. But this year money was too tight, she said.

Her daughter, who is a first-grader at Truman Elementary School, starts school before her son, who will be a sixth-grader at Wood Intermediate. The difference in start dates allows her to stagger the expenses of sending the two back to school. So far, she's spent as much as $30 on school supplies and another almost $80 in fees for her daughter. That expense comes at a time when she's still paying for summer-school programs.

"It's just a crunch," Kane said. "From the end of July to the first two weeks of August, it's just horrible for families."