Bloomfield school copiers have been busy: 3.1 million sheets in last five years
Friday, July 30, 2010
By Nick Schneider, Assistant Editor
Paper, paper and more paper.
Reams of paper are churning through copy machines in the Bloomfield School District at the clip of 3.1 million sheets in the last five years.
Thursday night, the school board talked about copy machine use and board member Steve Dowden called for the administration to look at developing a policy that might curb some of the paper use.
Superintendent Dan Sichting reported to the board that since a copier lease agreement was signed five years ago with Hudson Office Solutions of Washington, the usage on five copy machines has exceeded 3.1 million copies.
That tallies to an average of 628,897 sheets a year.
There are 500 sheets in a ream.
The high school copier logged 1,044,485 -- with 954,508 black and white copies and 89,977 color copies, followed by the elementary school copier with 1 million copies.
A copier in the high school library has 750,000 copies on its meter, while the central office copier utilized by the superintendent and his staff is at 350,000, according to figures provided by Sichting.
There are other copiers in the junior high office as well as the elementary school workroom that are not included in the totals.
Thursday night, the superintendent proposed to replace three of the four machines on the previous agreement with Hudson Office -- leaving the central office copier in service at this time.
"The copiers are at the end of their usage life due to large copy counts," Sichting pointed out to the board.
Hudson was the low lease bidder on the three Sharp brand copy machines -- $2,172 per year for the elementary school; $3,902.51 per year for the high school; and $2,172 per year for the high school library.
Sichting said the staff is encouraged to conserve paper by doing double-sided copies, when possible. He noted that the use of Smart Board computer technology in all of elementary school classrooms along with file sharing should also help cut the paper usage throughout the district.
He noted that using the Smart Board, test papers could be projected on a large screen for students to view and then a simple answer sheet could be used by the students to record their answers.
The board is also planning to convert to paperless pre-meeting informational materials that would be e-mailed to board members or provided to them at a specific website as a means of conversing.
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