The new school year is close enough that Prichard families are already doing the math on supply lists. The Krewe of Tides is trying to take some of that math off the table.
The Krewe of Tides Inc. and KOT CARES are presenting a Level-Up Back to School Bash later this month, and students will walk away with what they need to start the year.
The Details
When: Saturday, July 25, beginning at noon. Where: A.J. Cooper Municipal Complex, Prichard. What students receive: free clear bookbags and school supplies.
The venue itself carries local history. The A.J. Cooper Municipal Complex is named for Arthur J. Cooper, the longtime Prichard mayor who led the city for decades and remains one of the defining figures in its municipal history, and the complex serves as one of the city’s principal gathering places for civic events. Community organizations across Prichard have long relied on city facilities like it to stage giveaways, health fairs and voter drives, and the complex’s central location makes it accessible to families across the city’s neighborhoods.
Events of this kind have become a staple of late July in Mobile County, when the school calendar turns and household budgets turn with it. For organizers, the goal is simple: students should walk into their first day of class with the same tools as their classmates, and no family should have to choose between supplies and other bills to make that happen.
Why Clear Bookbags
The choice of clear backpacks is not incidental. A growing number of school systems across Alabama and the Gulf Coast now require transparent bags as a security measure, which shifts the cost onto families who may have just bought a perfectly good opaque one. Handing out compliant bags directly removes a small but real barrier for households already stretched by August expenses.
Clear bag requirements spread across American schools in recent years as districts searched for security measures that could be implemented without installing metal detectors at every entrance. Administrators who have adopted the policies argue that transparency lets staff see the contents of a bag in seconds, deters students from carrying prohibited items, and speeds up morning entry lines. In the Mobile area, as elsewhere, the policies have drawn a mix of parental support and grumbling — support from families who welcome the added security, and frustration from those who see students penalized financially for a rule they did not write.
The cost issue is real. A compliant clear backpack, particularly a durable one that can survive a full school year, is not always cheaper than a conventional bag, and families that bought an opaque bag in a previous year cannot necessarily reuse it under a new policy. School supply drives that hand out clear bags therefore do something more targeted than a generic giveaway: they deliver exactly the item the district’s rules now demand, freeing a family’s limited dollars for everything else on the list.
For the Krewe of Tides, the clear-bag giveaway doubles as a statement about how community organizations can respond when policy changes land on household budgets. Rather than debating the requirement, the organization has chosen to absorb the cost of compliance for as many students as its supplies allow.
More Than Supplies
Organizers say additional resources will be available at the event beyond the giveaways, and a guest speaker is scheduled. Krewe of Tides Vice President Curtis Jordan and President David Wright-Morgan have been promoting the event and outlining what families can expect on site.
Back-to-school bashes in the Prichard area typically function as resource fairs as much as giveaways, with tables from community groups, health providers and city departments alongside the supplies. Parents who attend can often pick up information on after-school programs, tutoring, youth sports and municipal services in the same trip — a bundle that saves working families the chore of chasing each resource separately through the school year. The guest speaker slot gives organizers a way to put a motivational frame on the morning, particularly for students entering milestone grades.
The Krewe of Tides itself is part of the Gulf Coast’s distinctive civic landscape. Krewes along the Alabama and Mississippi coasts are best known for their role in Mardi Gras, the carnival tradition that Mobile claims as the oldest in the country, but the organizations behind the parades have increasingly built year-round charitable arms. KOT CARES, the krewe’s charitable component, follows a model common among Gulf Coast carnival organizations: the same membership that stages festivities turns to community service during the rest of the calendar, backing scholarship efforts, holiday drives and events like the Level-Up bash.
A Recurring Local Effort
Back-to-school drives have become one of the more reliable pieces of the summer calendar in Prichard and north Mobile County, filling a gap that school budgets do not reach. For a family with several children, the combined cost of bags, notebooks, pencils, folders and required supplies can run well past a hundred dollars per student before a single uniform is purchased.
The economics behind that figure explain why the events keep drawing crowds. Teachers and parent organizations have documented for years how classroom supply lists have grown longer as school budgets stretch thinner, with families expected to provide items — from cleaning supplies to headphones — that previous generations of students never saw on a list. Multiply a standard list across two, three or four children, add district-required uniforms and fees, and the August total can rival a month’s groceries for a working household.
In Prichard, where household incomes run below the county average and many families budget week to week, community giveaways are not a nice-to-have but a piece of the school readiness picture. Churches, fraternal organizations, nonprofit groups and krewe charities have all taken turns staging distribution events through the summer, and city leaders have generally welcomed them as partners in getting students to the first day of school equipped to work. The cumulative effect, organizers say, is that a student’s preparedness depends less on the household’s income than it otherwise would.
Families planning to attend should arrive close to the noon start, as supplies at events like this are typically distributed while they last.
What Families Can Expect
Organizers have encouraged families to come early, bring their students, and plan to spend some time on site. Beyond the bookbags and supplies, the event gives parents a chance to meet the krewe’s members and learn about the organization’s year-round work, and it gives students a late-summer reminder that their community is invested in their school year before it begins.
For the Krewe of Tides and KOT CARES, the bash is also part of a longer-term presence in the city — a visible way for the organization to put its name behind something families can use, and to keep the connection between carnival tradition and community service alive on the calendar.
The City Behind the Event
Prichard’s role as host reflects its place in the Mobile County landscape. The city of roughly 20,000 residents sits in the northern stretch of the county, wedged between Mobile and the industrial corridors of Chickasaw and Saraland, and its neighborhoods have produced generations of families who send children into the Mobile County Public School System — the largest school district in Alabama. Schools serving Prichard have faced the same pressures confronting urban districts across the state, and community organizations have historically stepped in to bridge the gap between what classrooms need and what budgets supply.
That tradition of local self-help runs deep in the city. Civic clubs, church congregations and neighborhood associations have organized school supply drives, turkey giveaways and toy distributions for decades, and the pattern has hardened into an expectation: when the calendar turns to late summer, families know where to look. Events like the Level-Up bash slot themselves into that network, adding capacity rather than inventing a tradition from scratch.
How Families Can Prepare
Organizers and veteran attendees of similar events offer practical advice for families heading to a distribution. Arriving at or before the noon start matters most, since quantities are finite and the line forms quickly once doors open. Bringing the students themselves is usually expected — most giveaways hand bags and supplies directly to the children they are meant for — and families with children in multiple grades should plan for each student to receive their own materials.
Parents may also want to check their school’s supply list before arriving, since district lists vary by grade level and school. While the bash covers the core items, some classrooms require specific materials that generic drives do not stock, and knowing the list in advance lets a family target what they still need to buy after the event. The remaining dollars saved can matter as much as the supplies themselves.
The Season Ahead
The bash lands in the final stretch before teachers return and classrooms fill, when school zones snap back to life and the rhythms of the academic year resume across Mobile County. For the students who collect a clear bookbag on Saturday, the practical benefit shows up on the first morning of class — a compliant bag on their shoulders and a stocked pencil case, standing next to classmates carrying the same. For the organizers, the measure of the event is simpler still: fewer students starting the year empty-handed, and a little less math for Prichard families to do in August.