NCDPI employees have brought in many donations during the past two weeks for the C2C school supply drive we conducted for President Obama’s and Governor Perdue’s “United We Serve” campaign. I would like to thank them for their generosity to this worthy cause.
It is not every day that I get to walk down the street carrying a 3-foot long red plastic crayon. But once I heard about the “Crayons2Calculators-Durham Teachers Warehouse Corp.,” I knew it would be the perfect place to take my larger-than-life-sized crayon bank on a field trip. And I was right.
“Crayons2Calculators,” or C2C, is a nonprofit organization based in Durham County that collects new or gently-used school supplies and then holds special events in a donated warehouse space and invites local teachers to come "shop for free" for the supplies they need. The group was founded and for the most part, is staffed, by college student volunteers from Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill. It takes a special organization to bring students from these rival schools together and that is exactly what C2C is. These students, along with their executive director, Jenna Boitano, and some board members, have recognized a need in their community and are working to make sure all classrooms teachers have the tools they need to help students succeed.
I visited the C2C warehouse on the final of three “shopping” days held for teachers from Merrick-Moore, Glenn, Holt, Y.E. Smith and C.C. Spaulding elementary schools. The shelves were depleted but teachers still managed to fill their baskets, boxes and carts with “100” points worth of free supplies. Desk organizers were 1 point, as were 10 pens and packs of notebook paper. I met a teacher who was loading up on glue sticks (the kind that tasted horrible so students were less tempted to snack on their art projects). Others selected hand-held hole punchers and poster board. One teacher admitted she had spent close to $1,000 of her own money on supplies for her classroom last year. She said her visit to the C2C warehouse would help her to get the supplies her students needed without worrying how to pay her own bills for the month.
NCDPI employees have been bringing in donations for C2C for the past two weeks and I would like to thank them for their generosity to this worthy cause. It took a few volunteers and numerous trips to the car to get our first load of hundreds of dollars worth of donations into the warehouse. And as I promised the C2C volunteers, next time I bring my big red crayon to the warehouse, it will be filled with pounds of spare change they can use to re-stock their shelves with more crayons, calculators and anything our teachers need to support our students so they can learn and succeed.