Great deals on toilet paper and No.2 pencils

Portland Public Schools (PPS) recently held their quarterly yard sale in an effort to make some quick cash during lean times. The true winners of the auction are difficult to discern since half of the bidders at the auction were employees of PPS.

Items for sale included basketball hoops, sewing accessories and pallets of wood for shop classes. But other supposed “surplus” could be considered indispensable for teachers: reams of photocopy paper, laser printers, desks and 32 cases of toilet paper were sold for fractions of their value. A Skutt electric kiln, which could fetch $2,500 brand new or $950 on eBay, sold for $56. When the auction closed, the district raked in $6,357.

This is infuriating. Portland Public Schools advertised the items in The Oregonian and on Craigslist for a week before the actual auction. Why not sell them through classifieds or eBay? $6,300 begins to seem like a silly number when the cases of toilet paper alone—which brought in $325 for the district—retail for $1,800. In charity auctions, most items up for bid are donated. Bidders are able to get deals on items they usually can’t get elsewhere. The school district auction attracts bargain investors who sell the PPS supplies at a huge profit.
Basically, they do what the schools should have done all along.

Rebecca Levison, president of the Portland Association of Teachers union, says that, “Every year teachers spend, on average, $600 from their own pocket on classroom supplies. I’m certain much of what was sold teachers would have used in their classrooms.”

If teachers could use these items, where does PPS get their surplus? According to Willamette Week, individual district departments had discarded all items, and it was up to departments to donate the items on their own if they wanted them to go to schools.

I’m not sure it’s up to the PPS to decide that the supplies should even go up for sale. According to the PPS Web site, “Portland Public Schools operating funds come from the State School fund, fed by income taxes, local property taxes and, this year, federal stimulus funds.”

Taxpayers paid for the supplies at top dollar with the expectation that they would be used, not hocked at bargain basement prices or sold back to PPS employees. District spokesman Matt Shelby admits that there’s currently no mechanism to tell teachers what’s available. So teachers are kept in the dark while bargain hunters are notified a week in advance of the PPS warehouse’s inventory.

Something is wrong here. Why is there such a disparity between schools that some are desperate for supplies and others can give them away? One problem, according to PPS administrators is school size. Schools with low enrollment can’t compete with larger ones that get an understandably bigger chunk of funds. As a result, supplies and course offerings are hard to come by.

In an article on Portland middle school disparities, Willamette Week showcased the shocking difference in education from schools in the same district. Robert Gray Middle School in Southeast Portland offers choir, concert band, cadet band, French, Spanish, art, journalism and technology classes. Beverly Cleary K-8 School in Northeast Portland offers an elective called “Puzzles,” where students learn Sudoku. Jackson Middle School provides 342 minutes of instruction a day. Peninsula K-8 School in Kenton gets 320 minutes a day. That adds up to two fewer weeks of school a year.

Really, there’s no one to blame but the economy. Educators and administrators are working hard to stretch a limited budget that’s down 3 percent from last year. According to The Oregonian, Superintendent Carole Smith proposed $32 million dollars in reductions through a combination of furlough days, pay freezes, reserve spending, staff reduction and central office cuts. The district plans to use $9 million of its $38 million reserves to help fill the budget gap. Amazingly, only 40 full-time positions—teachers or administrators—will be eliminated.

Portland Public Schools administrators need to practice some of that sustainability that Portland is famous for. A warehouse full of supplies is wasteful, especially when educators are forced to buy their own provisions on a limited salary. Increased communication between district administrators and neighborhood schools can only benefit the quality of education offered in Portland’s largest school district.

Let’s make use of what we already have instead of letting it gather dust in a warehouse. Grabbing a deal on a lifetime’s supply of toilet paper may seem like a nifty way to cheat the system, but you’re really only cheating the kids.