- Chicago Public Schools has ordered a principal who threw out dumpsters-full of unused school supplies to retrieve the boxes of tape, glue, test-prep books and reading books out of the garbage bins and bring them back into the building.
District officials, who are facing a $612 million deficit, said they learned of the discarded school supplies at Northwest Middle School in the Belmont-Cragin neighborhood on Thursday. They plan to pick up the supplies, determine what can still be used and then distribute some of the items to other schools in need.
“School supplies should never thrown away unless they are completely unusable or unsuitable for the classroom, and this certainly was not the case in this situation,” said CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll. Carroll said the value of the items had not been calculated.
We remember writing five or six years ago about entire store rooms in certain Chicago schools that were just packed with unused stuff - pallets of textbooks, boxes of unused computers, enough supplies to open an OfficeMax branch. It seems not much has changed in the intervening years.