Adam Dordea has the same interaction over and over during back-to-school season.
Dordea, the store manager at Office Max, said teachers come in all the time in the lead-up to the school year to buy school supplies. They come in with coupons and with deals in mind as they try to get the best value they can, Dordea said.
“Through conversation, I realized how much they’re actually spending out of their own pocket,” Dordea said. “Teachers were coming in and buying 50 notebooks and a hundred folders.”
Many students, the teachers said, didn’t come from families who had enough money to buy all the school supplies they need. Teachers were taking things into their own hands, Dordea found. He referred to a Department of Education study that revealed that 94 percent of teachers spend their own money on school supplies, and they spend an average of $479 on school supplies per year.
Nationwide, Office Max does a “Give Back to Schools” promotion where people can donate 5 percent of their purchase to the local school of their choice. Dordea wanted to launch a program specifically for these teachers who were spending money out of their own pocket.
There are always school supplies left unpurchased and in storage, Dordea said, and he wanted to gift those to Juneau classrooms. He also wanted to get the community involved, as he’d seen how generous Juneau residents can be with food drives and other fundraisers in town. He spoke with higher-ups at Office Max and they agreed that a program like that could work, and Stuff the Bus was born.
This past Thursday, tightly wrapped boxes of school supplies rested on pallets in front of Office Max, ready to go to classrooms around town. Dordea said the conservative estimate was that there was $10,000 worth of school supplies that Office Max was donating and more than $3,000 worth of supplies purchased by Juneau residents for the program.
“It’s been heartwarming,” Dordea said. “It’s been nice to see. It’s definitely comparable to what I’ve seen at the food bank and other organizations. It’s exactly what we were trying for.”
Juneau School District Superintendent Bridget Weiss — on her first day on the job since being selected recently as the district’s interim superintendent — was elated at the sight.
“I’m a school supply fanatic, so I love all the fancy pencils and the pens and the notebooks,” Weiss said. “I think that just engages kids when they have those engaging and new, fresh supplies. It takes that financial pressure off our families that are just really trying to make ends meet.”
School starts Monday, and Weiss said elementary schools are the priority for these supplies. Steve Byers, a special education teacher at Harborview Elementary School, will be instrumental in distributing the donations.
A few years ago, Byers started the Juneau Teacher Store, which collects school supplies at wholesale and makes them available for teachers in the district.
Byers said he’ll get volunteers from the Juneau Education Association (teachers in the district) to break down the boxes and distribute them to elementary schools, including the charter school and Montessori schools. Byers said there are storage rooms in each building, and they’ll stock those rooms for teachers to go in and get supplies if needed.
Though school starts soon, there’s still time for people to donate to the program. Dordea said the program runs through Tuesday. People can come into the store, hand over money and tell Dordea and his staff to donate that amount of notebooks or pencils or any other school supply to the program. There are extended hours leading into the school year, he said, as the store is open from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday and 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday.
Byers said people can donate supplies to the Juneau Teacher Store as well, and can set up a time to drop off supplies by emailing juneauteacherstore@yahoo.com. Byers was pleased at the public’s response to the Stuff the Bus program, and said it’s encouraging to see people coming together for a cause like this.
“It takes a community to do something like this,” Byers said. “It’s really hard to do it you just have one or two people doing it.”
• Contact reporter Alex McCarthy at 523-2271 or amccarthy@juneauempire.com. Follow him on Twitter at @akmccarthy.
