The Chapel Hill-Carrboro Public School Foundation and the East Chapel Hill Rotary Club joined together to give local teachers around $38,000 worth of supplies ahead of the school year.
In its 14th year, the annual Teacher Supply Store works to provide teachers with supplies such as markers, poster boards and other essential items.
This year, the two groups partnered with Triangle Office Equipment to help elementary school teachers ahead of an academic year that will begin remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic. With many local school districts starting the year online — including Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools going remote until 2021 — teachers are requesting different supplies to help with the new format.
“Every year, we survey teachers to find out what they need and and this year with remote learning, every teacher said they needed anchor pads, which are big post-it sheets that they can put on the wall for remote teaching,” said Allison Worthy, a volunteer with the Teacher Supply Store.
With teaching shifting online, Tim Smith from the East Chapel Hill Rotary Club said it’s more important than ever to help teachers with supplies they need.
“These are supplies, such as the poster boards, that they can essentially use as chalkboards in their home,” Smith said. “The pens that they were supplied are multicolored and so they can write on the poster boards. The sticky notes can come in handy on those poster boards. And so anything that we can supply them with, any tool we can give them to make it easier to conduct classroom remotely, we’re happy and trying to do.”
Volunteers with the Teacher Supply Store wore masks at the distribution center and delivered the supplies to the front doors of the elementary schools to limit physical contact. Each teacher will receive $75 worth of supplies and gift cards. Social workers, AVID and novice teachers will also receive supplies.
The idea for the Teacher Supply Store started with a desire to help teachers in the local community.
“We determined that we could help thousands of students in Chapel Hill-Carrboro by helping hundreds of teachers with school supplies, because they were spending a lot of their own money on school supplies,” said Bill Whisenant. “They’re not the best paid people in the community and they shouldn’t have to be spending their own money on school supplies.”
At CHCCS’s July 16 meeting, interim Superintendent Jim Causby cited the Centers for Disease Control’s recommendation of COVID-19 positive test percentage be no greater than 5 percent in order to reopen schools. Data from North Carolina Health and Human Services shows that the state currently sits at a 7 percent positive rate.
Classes for Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools begin on Monday.
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