Families under the cosh from back-to-school costs

Calls to Society of Saint Vincent De Paul (SVP) in Galway have increased by 15% compared with last year, as back to school costs burden families already under pressure from the Covid-19 crisis.

The termination of book rental schemes in some schools has heaped additional costs on parents, and one-off costs such as laptops for first years are proving expensive for families preparing for a return to classrooms.

Many people helped by SVP locally have been ill during the Covid-19 pandemic or have lost their jobs because of it.

“What we are seeing is people are having unexpected costs because of illness, or because they are out of work – a lot of people haven’t gone back to work full-time yet. And when they’re hit with that, they’re ill or lost their job, they struggle with back-to-school costs and trying to provide for kids,” explained Marie O’Donovan, Secretary of Galway City East SVP.

“The biggest problem we’re seeing at the moment is that a lot of schools’ funding has been changed and a lot of schools that were doing book rental schemes can’t afford to do them this year, they don’t have the money, which means the kids have to buy the books themselves which is a huge cost versus renting.”

She said that when it was announced at the end of last term that the rental schemes were closing, parents were panicking.

“It’s a huge cost, hundreds of Euros for books,” she said. Laptops costing €700-plus are also costly along with the other back-to-school bills.

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