And each year I breathe a sigh of relief when they tell me they are excited about the beginning of school.

My children have been busy over the past two weeks trying to find just the right binders, markers, three-ring notebooks and folders (Those come in tab and no tab, you know. Don’t ask me to explain the difference, but my kids seemed to understand.).

They both spent time with their grandfather last week and he did something he’s probably never done before:

He went back-to-school shopping.

Turns out he ran into a couple ladies from church who thought it was, well, cute, that he was doing the back-to-school shopping thing with his granddaughter.

The first day of school is always one of the most exciting for me, traffic jams excepted.

It’s fun to go to school and watch as mothers and fathers leave their kindergartners with teachers for the first time.

We’ve all seen the children who cling fearfully to Mom as she tries to extract herself from the room.

But more interesting to me are the kids who wave their parents off as soon as they hit the doorway.

More often than not, it’s the parent in those cases who doesn’t want to leave. They are the ones who shed the tears.

For the next 13 years, those parents will be making cupcakes for class parties, doing science fair projects, sweating the arrival of report cards, attending ball games and buying all manner of stuff for their little ones.

And they will be back-to-school shopping. And they will be dreading the day when their child no longer looks forward to the first day of school.

The first day of school brings many other nagging questions, too. How will the school system pay for gas to run the buses? How will teachers manage to meet the needs of gifted students when they are so busy bringing up the scores of low-performing students? How will reassignment affect the makeup of the area’s schools?

To be sure, those are questions school system leaders have been wrestling with for some time and the best answers they’ve been able to come up with have, at times, fallen short of what everyone would like. School principals at East Wake High School, for instance, are focused on keeping students from dropping out.

On its face, that seems like a reasonable goal.

But one parent I spoke with last week said he believes that means there will be a dumbing down of the classroom material in an effort not to scare marginal students out of the classroom. If that happens, his daughter, who isn’t a dropout threat, will not be challenged the way she should be.

Diesel prices nationwide averaged $4.30 a gallon last week, a 47 percent increase over the same time last year.

In a school district that travels 17 million miles in a year picking up and dropping off students, that’s a lot of extra money that has to come from somewhere. School board leaders often take from curriculum needs because it’s an easy target since most folks don’t know what’s being spent on our students anyway.

And reassignment? School leaders are looking into a three-year reassignment process they say could lend some stability to school assignments, although they currently operate under a policy that no school will be touched by reassignment more than once every three years.

Still reassignment will draw many eyes in eastern Wake County this year with the opening of Lake Myra Elementary next school year.

At least the children are happy.