SUPPLIES AND DEMANDS : Of course KIDS feel anxiety about the new school year. But that’s nothing compared with what PARENTS feel trying to outfit them.

Jeanne Peterson knows the horror.

She knows the grim terrors that lie in wait the week before school starts, when kids are bracing for the fall semester and parents hear the two-word mantra that sends them into paroxysms of anxiety and dread:

School supplies.

“At my son’s old school, it was incredible ,” said Peterson, who lives in Laguna Niguel. “They had a very specific list. We had to buy a Rubbermaid container we put everything in . . . then a dry-erase board, dry-erase markers, a special dictionary.”

Peterson paused and winced.

“Not just any dictionary, mind you, but a special dictionary,” she said. “One year, I couldn’t find the exact pastel crayons he had to have until halfway through the year. I went to Kmart, Pay Less, Wal-Mart and everywhere; they were sold out.”

Peterson has the comfort of knowing she isn’t alone. Each year, Americans spend $6.2 billion outfitting children with equipment for the classroom, according to the National School Supply and Equipment Assn. in Silver Spring, Md.

To many parents, school supplies symbolize more than tools. The frenzy of shopping for them symbolizes shifting gears from a gentle, bucolic summer to the discipline of getting up early, dressing and parking oneself in the classroom.

For Laura Madariaga, 45, of Huntington Beach, back-to-school symbolizes the end of summer bliss. Though her sons are 20 and 18, she recalls the annual rite of passage with a sense of melancholy.

“You spent the summer so laid-back, and then suddenly you were back in the frenzy again,” Madariaga said. “My son used to hate those back-to-school ads in the newspapers. ‘No!’ he’d say. ‘I don’t want to see those ads, Mom. I hate those ads!’ ”

Madariaga, president of the Huntington Union Council, which oversees 23 parent-teacher organizations in Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley, remembers all too well the insanity of buying school supplies--only to learn on the first day of school that nothing she bought was on the teacher’s list of what she should have bought.

“I remember one year having to drive all over the county for a red pen,” she said. “We went to Sav-On; we went to Target. Still no red pen. And it had to be a very special red pen, just like the one the teacher ordered. Argh!”

A lot of that could be avoided, Mindy Sander contends, if every district was as well-organized as she believes hers is. Sander, 36, the mother of twin boys, age 16, and an 11-year-old daughter, is president of the Los Alamitos PTA Council.

Los Alamitos, Sander says, makes a parent’s job easy.

“They send a list in the summer mail telling us exactly what we need,” Sander said, “so we’ve already been out there and gotten it done. Our district takes a lot of the madness out of it. You can go into Target and see the Los Alamitos and Garden Grove lists posted right there. It’s great.”

Jane Periolat, program director for technology with the Orange County Department of Education, said a growing trend in the United States is for schools to buy the supplies, box them and sell them at a flat rate to ensure consistency.

“But for some reason,” Periolat said, “I don’t know of any school locally that does it.”

Some parents mentioned a handful of private or parochial schools in the area committed to such mass buying for parents, but no public schools have embraced what seems to many to be an obvious course.

John F. Dean, county superintendent of schools for the Orange County Department of Education, responded to parents who puzzle over why a certain pen or protractor is important.

“I can speak to that from my own experience as a teacher and administrator,” Dean said. “For math teachers and science teachers who require a certain kind of protractor, for instance, they don’t want students buying the $1.50 variety that may fall apart in the classroom.

“Uniformity and standardization are extremely important, critical components in the teaching of a lesson. The instruction has to make sense to the students, and it won’t make sense if 30 different students have 30 different supplies for the exercise involved.”

Increasingly in Orange County, Dean said, schools are trying to relax school-supply madness by setting up stores on campus. High schools and a few middle schools stock such stores.

He applauded the Los Alamitos example of sending out lists to parents and stores to make everyone’s job easier.

It’s “just one of the reasons they’re a cutting-edge district,” Dean said.

Regardless of the district, kids have to be armed with pads, notebooks, pens, backpacks, lunch boxes, special-order textbooks, erasers and even computer paraphernalia.

Some schools require backpacks to tote all that stuff. It’s easy to spot the Nike swoosh on that $35 backpack, which scores of middle-schoolers deem as essential as pencils and glue.

Claudia McElwee of Mission Viejo has six children--ages 16, 14, 11, 10, 8 and 5. For her, gearing up for school is like staging boot camp for a houseful of G.I. Janes and Joes.

McElwee has two kids in high school, one in kindergarten and one each in the third, fifth and sixth grades.

“Once you get into the store, you see all the gimmicky things, which can drive you crazy and send the prices skyrocketing,” McElwee said. “I’ve also learned that if you wait until the last minute, everything has been picked over so thoroughly that you run the risk of finding nothing.”

For a kid who needs the right supplies and wants to look cool, nothing is unacceptable.

For parents who have other considerations, such as clothes, supplies can take a back seat.

“My biggest concern is shoes,” said Cindy LeSueur, 39, who has children 15, 13, 11 and 8 in a high school, a middle school and an elementary school in Mission Viejo.

LeSueur--who prepares for the school year as a kindergarten teacher at Cordillera Elementary School in Mission Viejo--insists on buying “really good shoes, not cheapies. Unless they’re durable, they’re a waste of money.”

She usually pays between $50 and $75 a pair, she says.

She also shells out $500 a year to the school district as annual bus fare for three students.

Only after shoes and bus fares “do I worry about glue, rulers, compasses, calculators, notebooks, pens and paper,” LeSueur said with a sigh. “Sometimes I buy it all and then find I need totally different things, so I’m forced to head out for a last-minute scramble.”

As a teacher , she endures a frenzy every year preparing her classroom for a deluge of 5-year-olds. In California, earthquake preparedness supplies are among essentials for the first day of school.

So LeSueur’s students (and their parents) also scour stores for flashlights, canned goods, blankets, bottled water, batteries and other things that might come in handy in the aftermath of an earthquake.

“For most parents,” she said, “there’s 101 things to do to get ready. It just never seems to stop, and at the end of the month, your checkbook shows you where you’ve been.

“I can’t believe our parents’ generation had it this bad. We’ve made it so complicated, and sometimes it’s insane. Just getting it done makes you feel like you’ve climbed a mountain, and in a way, you have.”