Video Features: Cecilia Adams, Manager of Community Partnerships, Guilford County Schools

What are the issues?

Teachers often spend up to $700 or more each year out of their own pockets on school supplies for students who can't afford their own or for those "extra" items that make a classroom special.

Meanwhile, businesses or groups that might be moving offices, changing their company names, or redesigning their logos often have items that they can no longer use. It seems only logical to capture these unneeded corporate items and reuse them.

However, donation drives yield so many items that schools quickly run out of space and teachers cannot easily access the supplies.

Cecilia Adams, Manager of Community Partnerships,
Guilford County Schools

What are they doing?

Community partners including the Guilford Education Alliance, the Welfare Reform Liaison Project, Leadership Greensboro and the Junior League of Greensboro, host the Teacher Supply Warehouse, where local businesses can donate unused items or supplies. The items range from overstock paper, pens with old logos, old address books, and video cases.

Teachers from 50 Title 1 and Mission Possible Schools have access to the Warehouse on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3 to 6 PM.

Although the Warehouse stocks many supplies that others consider worthless, teachers find ways to use these same materials in the most creative ways.

Ingrid Weathers, Social Worker, Washington Elementary School

How does this make a difference?

Cecilia Adams, Manager Community Partnerships, Guilford County School System says, "I'm amazed at the stories I've heard from teachers on how they put the donations to use in the classroom."

Per Adams, since the opening of the Teacher Supply Warehouse in November 2007, Guilford County businesses put more than $250,000 in supplies into our classroom. These surplus items would have been warehoused or thrown away.

Adams tells us, "Teachers are creative and industrious people who see teaching tools in items, which to the rest of us look useless. A good example of this is a donation of Styrofoam blocks we received from a video rental company. The blocks are about the size of a VHS tape, but to teachers, they become a counting game or building blocks for art projects."

"We had a donation of out-dated pocket calendar/address book combos. One teacher saw the alphabetized address pages as a great tool for students to record their weekly vocabulary words."

These contributions, often seen as outdated or useless by corporations, become valuable, reusable items in the eyes of teachers. The Supply Warehouse offers the following advantages:

• Companies can easily donate unwanted supplies to a central location.

• The items can be stored on a long-term basis.

• Teachers can gain access to these "treasures" easily.

The Supply Warehouse has been a win-win initiative.