Various departments at SCHS have their own material distribution process, yet due to some material shortages, many staff members hope to make the process more efficient.
Many teachers receive materials for their classroom by putting in a request to the chair of their department. Math teacher and department chair Taylor Burk explained what this process is like as a chair.
“When it comes to materials – I’m talking markers, scissors, glue paper, that sort of thing – comes from Office Depot. Teachers will come to me, and I fill out an order, and I get it from the bookkeeper, Ms. Schofield,” Burk said. “And those purchases have to be approved. If anything comes back that’s a little bit odd, it doesn’t get approved from the district, and that can be kind of frustrating,” Burk said.
Math teacher Marlene Spector often goes out of her way to buy materials for the class. These materials are small purchases, but acquiring graphing calculators for her classroom is expensive.
“I’ve made purchases on my own, just some of the smaller things. One of the things that was one of the biggest material purchases I needed to get were graphing calculators,” Spector said.
At the beginning of the school year, materials are often collected by department chairs in larger quantities in hopes they will last the school year. For Spanish teacher Adrian Solorio, requesting materials during the school year can be difficult.
“We try to have our materials before we try to plan before the beginning of the year, so that we don’t run out of supplies in the middle of the year. But throughout the year, we also make requests,” Solorio said
Material shortages not only affect faculty but also students on campus. In an attempt to collect hands-on materials, Burk sometimes struggles to purchase all of them on her own.
“We were using bags of candy corn all day to perform an experiment. I bought that candy corn myself. I wouldn’t have assumed that the school would ever approve that sort of purchase,” Burk said. “I think it’s important to students, and that helps to teach the concepts that I’m trying to teach.”
Over time, many staff members attempt to find as many materials as possible for their classes. Spector mentioned that Donors Choose, a funding website to help with school materials worldwide, helped her receive the needed materials.
“Acquiring a set of calculators has been about a four-year journey. But we finally acquired a set using Donors Choose,” Spector said.
Spector suggests that SCHS, along with other schools in the community, should have some communication among the district in order to keep materials organized for each campus.
“Sometimes there’s materials out there, and we just don’t know where to find them,” Spector said. “We could say we need something for our classroom, and then perhaps the district knows that another school doesn’t need those materials anymore but we need them, and they could just move them from school to school.”