Our exchange students in the past have gone through, bought EVERYTHING on the supply list, and ended up leaving half of it here when they left to go home. This year, we had the kids shop from abandoned supplies from former students (some things brand new, some just in really good shape). Anything that we KNEW they'd need that we didn't have on hand (like pens and pencils), we took them to buy.
From there, we waited until each one listened to the teacher for each class explain what supplies they'd need... and just had them buy those. The students spent something like $15 this year versus about $150 for past years (calculators aside-- some of them didn't bring graphing calculators that needed them).
Now, some teachers in our high school will offer extra credit for bringing classroom supplies-- like printer paper, cleaning wipes, etc. That's always a nice perk because the students always look forward to extra credit (15 points could mean that you could accidentally forget a daily assignment and it not hurt your grade, or 15 points could help you get THAT much further ahead if you miss a question on a test or something). I ALWAYS advise the students to bring in anything they can reasonably afford to if it means extra credit.
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