For 'Schools Are Us,' It's All in the Name

Imagine: you’re a parent of a young daughter and her first day at a new elementary school is in a couple days. You want to make sure that everything is perfect so she has less stress. She just needs to get her uniform and she’ll be all set. Unfortunately, your daughter is a little bit bigger than most kids and you can’t find a jumper to fit her.

Or, consider this scenario: It’s the middle of January and your son comes home from school with his polo dirtied from a marker mishap and a bloody nose during recess. You need to find a new school shirt as soon as possible. But in winter, department stores aren’t stocking school polos and you can’t wash the mess out of your son’s shirt.

This is where Schools Are Us, a Mt. Greenwood store that stocks uniforms and other items for 38 area schools, comes in. Open year-round, Schools Are Us can get you that new polo in January and might have that larger-size jumper right before school starts.

“It’s a different kind of business, but I like it,” owner Kathleen O’Shea said.

O’Shea opened Schools Are Us 19 years ago after visiting another school uniform store and feeling unwelcome and unsatisfied.

“That place was different,” she said. “It didn’t let you come past the counter…They wouldn’t let you touch anything. So I wanted a store where people could come in, touch the clothes, try them on, feel them.”

As a mom at St. Christina, she had plenty of experience with elementary school uniforms. Prior to Schools Are Us, O’Shea ran a silk-screening business out of her house.

“It’s nice because the kids can come up on their bikes to get stuff. The neighborhood’s always been decent, too,” O’Shea said. “I was a mom first, I’m not a businessperson.”

Now, she offers advice to elementary schools when they are considering changing parts of their uniforms, such as adding embroidery or changing the color of the polo shirt. She also counsels parents who may be buying uniforms for their kids for the first time.

“They only need three blouses: one on, one in the wash, one waiting to go on,” she said. “Unless you’re working, then you maybe want to add another blouse to make your life a little easier.”

O’Shea said she’s noticed a trend in the number of people buying more public school uniforms instead of Catholic school uniforms. “You wonder what’s going to happen in the future because a lot of [Catholic] grammar schools are down in enrollment because tuition is so high,” she said. “If you’re paying big money for tuition, you have to have your plaid…What I paid for college, [people] are paying for high school. It’s a rude awakening.”

For the store, back-to-school shopping starts when they order their inventory in November. The store is open year-round, but the hardest part of O’Shea’s job is “having the items in stock…getting it all ready to go [and] knowing what to have. You have to guess,” she said.

O’Shea didn’t have to hesitate when asked about her favorite part of owning Schools Are Us. “I enjoy meeting all the people,” she said. “You meet all sorts of characters, but I’ve made a lot of friends over the years. It’s funny—they come back now and their kids are all in college, or they’re coming back with the grandkids. And I love when [kids] come up on their bikes—we give them Smarties.”