We got all of our materials on Amazon. It just seemed like the easiest and safest thing to do. I had initially looked at prebuilt kits but they ended being a lot more expensive than buying the items separately and then packing them together.

The items we packed into our kits were geared toward elementary school classes. The markers and crayons were the most expensive items in the kit so you could probably make more kits for middle schoolers and high schoolers.

• Pencil sharpeners
  • $8.95 for 72
  • $0.13 per bag
• Markers
  • $46.99 for 36
  • $1.31 per bag
• Paper bags
  • $24.99 for 100
  • $0.25 per bag
• Erasers
  • $19.99 for 100
  • $0.20 per bag
• Pencils
  • $12.49 for 150
  • $0.18 per bag
  • 2 per bag
• Notebooks
  • $31.79 for 24
  • $1.33 per bag
• Crayons
  • $33.27 for 24
  • $1.39 per bag
• Ruler
  • Individually sold
  • $0.47 per bag

Cost information

Each bag costs $5.26

To be fair, that’s if you get 100% usage. You can see by the quantities above that you don’t. We had to purchase 2 sets of crayons and notebooks and our limiting quantity ended up being markers at 36.

With “waste”, each bag costs $7.58

With tax and everything, my total cost was $272.92 so my actual cost per bag (36) was $7.58. To get closer to the $5 figure, I would have to have better utilization.

Dropping the markers is the most obvious way to get there but kids love markers. Maybe for middle schoolers or high schoolers, you could drop the markers and crayons to make the price better.

We created a small insert for each of the kits that gives information about what is in the kit and where to get more information about distance learning in the community.

Our local school district has been pretty good about putting up learning resources. We also have weekly lesson plans and scheduled video sessions with teachers.

Bilingual information

We also translated this to Spanish to make it more accessible.

Website information

Our school district keeps changing the actual web address where the COVID-19 materials are located. In order to keep the link working, even if the website was changed again, I have a redirect from this site to whatever happens to be the current COVID-19 site for our school district.

The most fun was had during the design of the kits. Each kit was hand-drawn and no two designs were the same. That being said, themes that both of my daughters liked did get repeated. It’s nearing Easter right now so many bunnies were drawn.

Our local school district, San Jose USD, is distributing meals every weekday between 10:30AM and 11:30AM. The pick up sites are all around the city, and one happens to be right down the street from us.

I went down and asked if they would mind if I handed out the kits and they were fine with it. So I popped on my mask and gloves and handed them out. They were so popular that I went through all of them in 30 minutes!

Some hints

Put a max number per car

One of the very first things I did was institute a 2 kit max per car if there weren’t any kids. I felt bad but I wanted to get them to a wide number of families so I couldn’t really hand out 5 or 6 at a time. If someone clearly had 3 kids in the car, I’d hand out 3 so it wasn’t a hard rule.

Leave the kids at home

I left my daughters at home for this part. I had a mask and gloves but I was reaching out and handing these bags to people. It didn’t seem necessary or smart to have my kids come along.

“Disinfecting” the kits

COVID-19 can’t live on paper products for more than a day. To ensure we didn’t inadvertently infect someone, I packed up all of the bags in cardboard boxes and left them in the car over the weekend. On Monday, I put on my gloves and mask and took them down to the pick up location. The weekend would have killed anything from us and the mask and gloves made sure I didn’t put anything on the bags or catch anything from people picking them up.

Obviously, the understanding of COVID-19 is constantly changing. I used the CDC as my main source of information: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/faq.html. If your more comfortable with additional precautions, you should follow those instead.