Area Schools to Benefit From Businesses’ Hand-Me-Downs

Ventura County education officials are collecting used equipment and supplies discarded by local businesses and offering them to public schools that are strapped for cash but sorely in need of new teaching materials.

The Ventura County superintendent of schools office this week launched the Classroom Materials Exchange to serve both private and public schools throughout the county.

Modeled on a successful program in Santa Barbara County, the exchange will redistribute to schools unwanted business supplies, ranging from used computers to cardboard tubing, county school officials said.

“We want businesses to recycle so we can reuse,” said Diana Rigby, curriculum director for the county superintendent’s office. “It’s a wonderful match.”

But county education officials are also using the program to encourage local schools to recycle their trash.

Schools that have recycling programs can take items from the exchange for free while the less environmentally minded will have to pay $5 for each bagful of materials. An estimated 90% of the county’s public and private schools recycle at least some of their trash.

Although the county superintendent’s office began last month to solicit local businesses for materials, so far only a handful of companies have come up with any offerings.

Except for a truckload of furniture donated by 3M Corp.’s Camarillo plant Thursday, the exchange now has only a collection of boxes of telephone cable, piles of foam-rubber packing material and cartons of empty film canisters. The exchange is located in a room at the county superintendent’s office at Camarillo Airport.

But one teacher said she had to rein in her enthusiasm when she and a colleague spotted the goods up for grabs at the exchange this week.

“We tried really hard not to take things that we could not use right away,” said Suzanne Williamson of Katherine School in Simi Valley. “Teachers have the habit of hanging on to things.”

Williamson said she had to hold herself back when she spotted a box of plastic gears that she coveted: “I don’t know what I’d use them for.”

But she grabbed some items, including telephone cable donated by Southern California Edison Co., that Williamson’s team-teacher for the sixth grade plans to strip and use for classroom electricity experiments.

“It’s a real gift because you don’t have to go to Radio Shack,” Williamson said.

For science teachers, the exchange comes at a particularly good time, she said.

This year, the state Department of Education issued new guidelines encouraging science teachers to spend less classroom time on textbooks and more on hands-on experiments.

The problem is, Williamson said, buying all the items required for such experiments. “We have all these wonderful new science units but we’re a little poor as far as the materials go,” she said.

The exchange can also benefit businesses by providing a tax write-off and single drop-off spot for unwanted materials, said George Gunnell, a 3M Corp. manager and a member of the nonprofit Ventura County Economic Development Assn., which helped county educators set up the exchange.

In addition to the furniture that 3M donated Thursday, the company plans to contribute several old computers.

At one point in the past, 3M let employees bid on such used equipment. Then Gunnell began donating old furniture, filing cabinets and other items to individual schools around the county.

But Gunnell said he prefers sending used equipment to an exchange that will give all schools access to the goods. “It really helps us in getting it out where it belongs without people saying we have favorites here and favorites there,” he said.