The Nexus

As the California legislature reduces the total per-student funding, school supply budgets shrink.

One of the largest parts of this shrinking school-supply budget, copier costs, is now the target of a school-wide focus on reducing the use of school-bought paper and ink. According to finance director Lois Mangarelli, school administrators have made it a goal to decrease the number of copies teachers make. She said that, compared to years in the recent past, the attempts to do so have been successful.

“I’ve seen a reduction in copy costs and paper ordered based on the number of copies, the number of students and the number of personnel [this year],” Mangarelli said.

To accomplish this, however, Mangarelli said that teachers had to adopt practices such as uploading assignments to LearningPoint for students to print at home or re-using paper in their classrooms by running copies on the reverse side of other copies.

Despite these adjustments, copy costs still comprise one of the biggest components of the school supply budget. In this year’s first term, Westview’s teachers and administrators spent $7,785 of the $56, 484 supply budget to pay for copies.

Nonetheless, Mangarelli said that for the vast majority of teachers, more paper is still needed. To get this paper, she said that either students or teachers must pay.

“Some teachers do receive paper whether via donations or on their own,” she said. “But that’s money out of pocket for people.”

Humanities cadre leader and English teacher Amy Degenfelder said that these extra measures can sometimes pose a problem. While she said that teachers buying paper individually has been the norm, parent donations in recent years have gone beyond the classroom.

“Parents are being asked to donate to everything – transportation, sports, classes,” she said. “Although we do put up a poster that donations are welcome, we are as a staff trying to be aware that parents are being tapped.”

Degenfelder said that the drive to reduce copy costs has been relatively successful. In her department, she said that teachers are utilizing new LCD projectors and overheads to show lectures that students can copy on their own papers.

LearningPoint has also been an important tool, allowing students to print things like lecture notes and homework assignments on their own paper.

“Five years ago when I started here, I was copying random stuff like calendars,” Degenfelder said. “Now [teachers] just put tons of [assignments] on LearningPoint.”

Overall, though, the cost for copies remains high. Degenfelder said that the school allocates $80 per teacher per year for copy needs. The humanities department augments this with $150 for each teacher from its annual budget, but the gap between supply and demand remains. This extra $150 creates an expense for the department itself.

To deal with this cost, Degenfelder said the department prioritizes supplies that must be bought for all teachers versus those that can be bought individually.

“The two things we made sure we had this year were paper and scantrons,” she said. “And if we run out of staples, we run out of staples.”

For other departments, however, the priority supplies are more expensive. Science teacher John Rankin said that while his department has also moved to reduce paper and copy use, the high cost of science supplies requires an even greater reduction to less-critical paper costs.

“We still need paper, there’s no doubt about that,” he said. “But for other departments, it’s more crucial to have a large [copy] budget because that’s what they do. They don’t need to buy the lab stuff that we do.”

As for parent donations, Rankin said that science classes have required a great deal. According to Rankin, the total cost to teach four class of AP Biology is $3,500, and this must come from the $15,000 total budget the science department is granted. All students taking an AP-level science course, or other classes needing extra supplies, such as zoology, were encouraged to donate.

“[Donations are] the only way we’re going to be able to teach science classes,” he said. “A number of the teachers agree that we’re just going to have lab fees really soon in order to take a science class, especially if the budget’s going to be even worse next year.”

But Rankin also said that techniques similar to those of the humanities department have been used. He said that a great deal of science teachers have put their curriculums on LearningPoint and are using paperless lecture methods.

“[Our paper demands] have gone way down compared to what I used to use,” Rankin said. “When I taught at [Mt. Carmel], I would do thousands and thousands and thousands of copies for students because you had to be able to hand [the assignment] to them].”

For the school as a whole, however, Rankin said that these adjustments can only go so far.

“We keep cutting the budget and being more frugal,” he said. “But pretty soon if you don’t get enough parent donations to make up for loss of money, you don’t do some activities. And at the AP level, you can’t get away with that. You either teach the class or you don’t offer the class.”

Degenfelder said that the administrators are still searching for a way to handle the needs of all classes and departments. She said that if the budget is reduced further next year, the consequences are unknown.

“The big question is, what can we do differently [to cut spending]; what can we think of that we haven’t done before,” she said. “I don’t know if we’ve come up with any answers. [The leadership cadre] wants to make sure everybody has what they need. But it’s just not going to be that way. Everyone’s not going to be able to get what they need, and it’ll be interesting to see how we cope with that.”