Like many teachers, when 2016 OSI-Baltimore Community Fellow Melissa Badeker changed professions, she was struck by how much stuff she had accumulated – and unsure what to do with it all. So she hoarded it all, in her basement.
“Teachers hold on to our supplies because we put a lot of time and effort into them. We think maybe we’ll go back to teaching. Or we know how valuable they would be to someone else,” Badeker says. “Until the day my husband and I were about to move to a different house – and I had no choice but to throw them all away, and literally I cried. It was really upsetting. Pretty much from that moment on, I thought no one should have to do that again. Every teacher I know needs things.”
So she and a colleague, former teacher Kathleen Williams, decided to do something about the piles and piles of supplies they knew gathered in teachers’ classroom closets, home attics and in school building basements. Together, they started the Baltimore Teacher Supply Swap to get the folders and crayons and paper and textbooks and scissors and glue sticks into the hands of teachers who can use them.
Today, the Teacher Supply Swap is growing and thriving. A recent article in the Baltimore Sun highlighted the success of Badeker’s efforts. And Badeker is looking to do even more with the swap, hoping to start a delivery service, for example, and make the inventory tracking system more sophisticated so that teachers can place orders for what they need online.
“We’re here to help the teachers,” Badeker says. “And whatever the teachers tell us they need, we do our best to make it happen.”
Teachers all over the region benefit from the shelves and shelves of supplies at Badeker’s shop – but they also are a primary source of donations. Cindy Wynn (right) of Lutherville, donated about a dozen boxes of paper, pencils, sticky notes, teacher workbooks and other supplies, when she left Stoneleigh Elementary School after 20 years as a special educator to go work at Baltimore Highlands Elementary School. “I had boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff in my basement,” Wynn says. “I didn’t want to throw it away. When I saw the Teacher Supply Swap, I thought ‘This is great!” But I never had time to get down there. And then Melissa said, ‘We’ll come pick it up!’”
Many teachers have become so enamored with the Supply Swap, they moved from being shoppers to donors to regular volunteers. Mary Catherine Irving (right), a McDonogh School teacher for 28 years, organizes two big schoolwide donations twice a year, and also works once a month at the shop, helping stock, label and organize supplies and help teachers find what they need. “In my opinion, this is the coolest place in town. I absolutely love it,” says Irving, who teaches pre-first-grade. “[One recent Saturday], it was so amazing to see the things we donated flying off the shelves. Ninety percent of the teachers who were getting the supplies were first-year teachers. You see these young, idealistic, wide-eyed teachers coming in who are so incredibly grateful for these supplies.”
In many public schools, particularly in the city, teachers have to buy much of what you see on their classroom walls as well as the materials that children use to get their work done every day, Badeker says. Paper, bulletin board materials, pencils, notebooks, arts and crafts supplies, curriculum supplements – very little of that is provided to them by the school system, she says.
“The average teacher spends more than $600 a year on school supplies and some spend over $1,000,” Badeker says.
The item most needed by teachers, according to Badeker’s tracking system: pencils.
“They’re the number one thing people take,” she says. “And as soon as they come in, they’re gone.”
The supply shop is open on Thursdays from 3 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Saturdays from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Each time it’s open, the space gets crowded with teachers who are grateful for the opportunity to get the things they need to teach.
“This is amazing,” says Tonika Garibaldi, who teaches 6th– and 7th-grade at Lillie May Carroll Jackson, a charter school for girls in northeast Baltimore. “I didn’t know where to start with books and posters for my class. This definitely helps me.”
“Teachers can use just about anything,” Badeker says. “Something that looks like junk to one person can be classroom gold to a teacher. Empty containers, toilet paper rolls – to a teacher that can be used.”
Here, Laura Peter, 7th grade teacher at Golden Ring Middle, Stacie Boccanfuso, 2nd grade teacher at Reisterstown Elementary, and Alyssa Gibbs, 2nd grade teacher at Reisterstown Elementary, exit the Teacher Supply Swap with their haul of discarded junk-turned-treasure.
Not all donated supplies come from teachers. Badeker says a significant source of donations comes in the form of excess office supplies from businesses that are moving or re-branding, as well as individuals or families who accumulate arts and crafts supplies, games or puzzles and no longer need them. Here, Nenita Dagoyo (left), a teacher at Lockerman Bundy Elementary and Geraldine Goza, who teaches at New Hope Academy, collect binders and folders for their reading/math students and science classes, respectively. On this day, they also snagged flash cards, posters and coveted science instruments, such as a random temperature probe.
“We usually go to Lakeshore Learning and we spend $300 before school even starts,” Dagoyo says. “This will really help.”
“We get a lot of teachers who are very emotional about the things they’re giving to us,” Badeker says. “I had a teacher who was crying when she handed me her stuff. It’s because they’ve been holding on to it for a reason and they feel like it’s been fortuitous that now they’ve finally found a place to donate it all to. I appreciate those moments; I love seeing that. It brings great joy to me. It’s really rewarding to see how this benefits so many – from the donors’ perspectives, to the people who are getting the supplies, to the students, ultimately, in classrooms all over.”
