Leaving Chalkboards in the Dust
The chalkboard--that musty, dusty educational icon--is fast being erased in the classroom.
Workers in many schools, from San Francisco to Newport Beach, will spend this summer and next quietly prying off blackboards, educational fixtures with more history than the burnished apple or No. 2 pencil. When students return to class, they will be greeted by dust-free whiteboards.
They might never know the simple joy of smacking erasers together and watching sunlight filter through the ensuing cloud of dust. And they could completely escape feeling the visceral cringe caused by fingernails striking slate.
Manufacturers estimate that whiteboards are outselling blackboards 3 to 1. And you can blame it on chalk dust. It can aggravate allergies, gum up pricey computer hardware and sully everybody’s clothes.
“Give us 10 years and the chalkboard is something you’re going to find in an antique store,” said Paul Anderson, facilities manager for Riverside Unified School District.
The newer boards, also called marker or dry-erase boards, are dust free, cost about the same as blackboards, and are easy to clean and read, proponents say. But their detractors say a whiff of fumes from the nontoxic markers is worse than chalk dust ever was; the ink sometimes leaves “ghost” impressions; and sticky-fingered students like to walk off with the candy-hued markers.
Then there’s just plain nostalgia.
Blackboards first showed up in Western Europe in the 13th century, and by the mid-1800s they were regular schoolhouse fare. Originally made of heavy slate--which can last more than 100 years--chalkboards evolved into lighter, but rougher, flat boards stained black or steel finished with a faux slate coating.
Professors at the private College of Wooster near Akron, Ohio, last year insisted on keeping their original, century-old slate blackboards during an $11.5-million upgrade of the school’s chemistry building. The boards will look out on ultramodern lecture halls with under-the-seat computer ports.
For many adults, chalkboards conjure up fond and frightening recollections--learning cursive by tracing a teacher’s perfect, looping script or freezing in front of calculus class.
Rich Johnson, acting principal of whiteboard-equipped Las Flores Middle School in Rancho Santa Margarita near Mission Viejo and a graduate of Los Angeles city schools, admits mourning the chalkboard’s passing.
“One of my great memories was staying after school and wiping the boards [clean] with the big chamois at my elementary school in Los Angeles. I did it so well,” he said, laughing. “It gave me a great sense of self-esteem. We just don’t do that any more.”
With new boards slated for installation in Cypress High School this summer, teachers were allowed to choose chalk or markers. Most have opted for modernity. Not Mel Komatsu.
Komatsu’s mathematics classroom is a shrine to chalk dust. A 29-year veteran, Komatsu prides himself on drawing perfect circles freehand and keeping all eight of his blackboards occupied. Layers of yellow sediment fill his chalk tray and threaten to engulf a dozen erasers.
Komatsu doesn’t like marker boards. The rapidly scribbling teacher finds he can barely draw a line from one end of a board to the other without it streaking.
“The markers stink, and they dry out,” Komatsu said between exercises in graphing equations. “Right now, I go through 20-plus boxes of chalk a year. To change to markers would cost a small fortune.”
His colleagues, though, find whiteboards more visually appealing to students. The bright colors keep kids interested. The boards don’t smear, although some porous whiteboards can be harmed by indelible markers. Two Cypress teachers say chalk allergies make their skin peel. And markers don’t shed the dust that Komatsu finds so homey.
“The chalk builds up an inch thick in here,” said English teacher Nancy Mitchell, erasing boards after class. “If you don’t clean them yourself, it gets harder and harder to see.”
Those complaints--and fears about the effect of chalk dust on new computers--are helping propel whiteboard sales at the Quartet division of General Binding Corp. in Skokie, Ill. The company sold 2.5 million marker boards to education and business customers last year.
A 4-by-8-foot whiteboard made of coated pressboard retails at $240, compared with $250 for a chalkboard. The higher-quality porcelain-on-steel boards--more durable, magnetic and resistant to ghost images--cost $558. The life spans of boards of similar quality are about the same.
A box of four dry-erase markers retails for about $4; a dozen pieces of chalk cost about 59 cents.
The whiteout began with new school construction about 15 years ago. Whiteboards became the standard. Blackboards in older schools were replaced as they wore out. But as districts pass bonds and seek their share of a $9.2-billion statewide school construction and modernization levy, the pace of replacement is quickening.
Architects and manufacturers estimate that half to three-fourths of California classrooms have whiteboards.
Perhaps 90% to 95% of classrooms in the Los Angeles Unified School District retain chalkboards, said facilities general manager Lynn Roberts. Money from the district’s $2.4-billion Proposition BB, passed in 1997, will boost the whiteboard ranks a bit (about 10 of the district’s 800 schools will replace their slates this summer). But higher priority is placed on improving notoriously decrepit bathrooms and patching roof leaks.
Elsewhere, replacing chalkboards is automatic these days during modernization projects, said Margaret Brown, facilities planning manager for Riverside Unified School District and a planning committee chairwoman for the California Assn. of School Business Officers. She said schools from the San Francisco Bay Area to Santa Ana are gleefully ditching chalkboards and their dust.
“The blackboard is, in fact, disappearing,” she said. “It’s not [the endangered] Delhi Sands fly, because we’re helping it become extinct.”
Her school district constructs its own whiteboards from Home Depot supplies, she said, and fewer than one-fifth of Riverside’s classrooms still have chalkboards. Three more high schools will lose them this summer.
The transformation is even changing the face of school discipline: Instead of cleaning chalkboards during detention, now students toil at scrubbing away desk doodles, said Anderson, the Riverside district’s facilities manager.
“I suppose,” he said, “the scratching of nails on a chalkboard is a disappearing art.”
