A school district in a Pittsburgh suburb has donated more than 3,200 pieces of old furniture to the flood-affected schools in Kanawha County, and sent donated school supplies down, too.
Terry Hollandsworth, the Kanawha public school system's maintenance director, said the North Allegheny School District's donated furniture will be placed in Bridge Elementary and Elkview Middle.
Students of the other two flood-affected Kanawha schools - Herbert Hoover High, which the school system says won't reopen, and Clendenin Elementary, which also may never reopen - will be attending the Bridge Elementary and Elkview Middle facilities until portable classrooms are established for them. The school year for most Kanawha students starts Aug. 8.
"You can't believe what a relief it is to know we have furniture for students when they get ready to start back," Hollandsworth said. "It's comparable to what we have for our students, they just had an abundance of it, and very generously donated it."
Jo Welter, North Allegheny's human resources director, said her roughly 8,000-student, dozen-school district issued bonds to pay for renovations, including new furniture, at three of its schools.
She said most of the donated furniture from those three schools is about 15-20 years old but is still in decent shape. A short story on the district's website says the furniture is more than 25 years old.
Kanawha schools Purchasing Director Alan Cummings said he believes furniture needs are now taken care of. On Friday, North Allegheny's donated items - including chairs, cafeteria tables, adjustable height desks, teachers' desks and other furniture - covered a large part of what Tim Easterday said was a 10,000-square-foot warehouse space on Bigley Avenue in Charleston.
Yesterday, the school system's retired purchasing director who is on contract helping coordinate donations in the temporary warehouse, said the furniture is generally in good shape. He's still counting the exact number of donated items.
He said ordering new furniture after the late June flooding likely would've meant late delivery, considering that furniture usually needs to be ordered in April or May before a new school year begins because of the vast number of school districts and colleges buying it over that time.
Easterday said the warehouse also includes about 360 desks that were salvaged from Hoover's second floor. Much of that school got six to seven feet of water.
Welter said it's never easy to get rid of so much furniture, noting that auctioning it off may not get rid of it all, and there are costs for things like transporting it.
Hollandsworth said Kanawha school transportation department workers who had licenses to drive tractor-trailers rented some and drove up to Pennsylvania last week to load up the donations. He said North Allegheny freed up about 15 of its custodians' time to help load four tractor trailers with furniture.
"They worked all day and into the evening the first day, and then they finished the loading the next morning," Welter said of the Kanawha and North Allegheny workers.
Welter said North Allegheny teacher Dana Cornelius, who had family in West Virginia, spoke to retired teacher Sandy Stein about the need to donate supplies. Stein, who had volunteered with the Red Cross during the flood response, asked Welter, Stein's former principal, for a place to store donated school supplies.
Welter said that the same day she secured a building to house the donated supplies, she was having a conversation about the issue when Sally Scherling, assistant to North Allegheny Superintendent Robert Scherrer, suggested donating the furniture.
"And then I went straight to the superintendent because I knew it was a good idea," Welter said.
She said North Allegheny employees and community members have also contributed school supplies, including a minimum of about 150 backpacks, and Curtis Griffith, the district's custodian supervisor, volunteered his time to drive the supplies down.
"It means something to people," Welter said of donating. "And I really think - because it's kids and it's a school and that's what we are - it connected with people."
Reach Ryan Quinn at ryan.quinn@wvgazettemail.com, facebook.com/ryanedwinquinn, 304-348-1254 or follow @RyanEQuinn on Twitter.