Elementary school dumps old furniture in garbage
COTTAGE GROVE, Ore. -- For Mandy Conforth’s three children, the back patio is the classroom.
She does not have individual desks or chairs, so when she learned that Bohemia Elementary School had tossed outdated school furniture, she was furious.
“They may have had some value to someone,” said Conforth. “As taxpayers, it probably should have been offered to us first before recycling them or throwing them out.”
Conforth found out about the desk dumping when she got a call from friend and Bohemia neighbor Tammi Evans.
Evans said the furniture was in "perfectly fine" condition and could have been used by homeschoolers like Conforth.
“I saw Dumpsters just filled with furniture,” said Evans. “It was just heaping, and I thought what a huge waste. (Schools) are screaming 'we need more money, we need more money.' Well, there you had it right there.”
Both Evans and Conforth would have liked to see those items offered to the general public before being tossed away, but the South Lane School District said the furniture was 40 years old and useless.
“Some of these desks didn’t have backs or some of it was just so outdated we didn’t think it would have been of value to anyone,” said South Lane School District Superintendent Krista Parent.
The school district also addressed some concerns that schools were disposing of furniture in a time when budgets were too tight to afford to buy new ones.
“This isn’t going to affect the budget at all,” said Parent. “New furniture was brought to Bohemia from the Delight Valley school that shut down earlier this year.”
Here’s the school district’s explanation of why they tossed the Bohemia desks and bookcases: Furniture from Delight Valley was transferred to Bohemia when Delight Valley was shut down earlier this year. Those items allowed the school to replace what they call outdated and unusable pieces of furniture, which they tossed to the trash bins.
Schools will typically shuffle outdated furniture to other schools through a website comparable to Craigslist.
Bohemia did post the items on the website. They said they did not know how long the items were posted until they decided to dispose of the furniture.
The school did not recycle the furniture, but the garbage service took it upon themselves to disassemble the items for recycling.
KVAL News spoke with the South Lane Garbage Service and found that it costs about $500 to transport one 30-yard dumpster. The school had filled three.
Superintendent Parent said with only three maintenance workers for the entire district, there wasn’t enough personnel to break down the furniture or to sell it off.
“Could we have offered those out to the general public? Yeah, but you know again that takes staff time and we simply didn't do that,” said Parent.
The school district plans to sell off left over items from the Delight Valley School.
Parent said that will happen in the coming months.
