Supplies 101

Janice Harrington knows what it is like to live on $800 a month. The single mother was recovering from a work-related injury when she lost her job, her home and the security that goes with it. Sending her son to school with a new backpack, or even basics like pencils and paper, was out of reach. “You can manage a lot of life,” Harrington said. “But trying to come up with the extras, it gets hard. You just can’t.”

That’s where the Spokane Valley Community Center comes in.

For the seventh year, the nonprofit at 10814 E. Broadway Ave. is collecting school supplies to help low-income Spokane Valley families like Harrington’s prepare for the first day of school.

The school supply distribution program provides each child with a new backpack with all the supplies – gathered from the school-supply lists of Spokane Valley schools – and a fresh haircut.

“It provides him with what he needs to be ordinary; just to feel like he fits in,” Harrington said of her 12-year-old son.

This year, the center expects to provide school supplies to more than 1,700 children. That figure is a 20 percent increase from two years ago, said Mollie Dalpae, the community center’s executive director.

To meet the need, it has stepped up the collection drive called Stuff the Bus, with three big yellow school buses parked at various locations throughout Spokane Valley. Use of the buses was donated by local resident Michael Casey, Laidlaw transportation services, and the Spokane Valley Nazarene church.

So far, the center has only collected about 150 backpacks, Dalpae said. In addition to the bus drive, the center also has donation barrels at several drop-off points.

“It’s been really light so far. We haven’t even had to empty the barrels,” Dalpae said. “The need is great. All the government data shows that education is the only way out of poverty. If these kids aren’t ready to learn, on a level playing field with the rest of their peers, they don’t stand a chance.”

In recent years, school districts’ shrinking budgets have put the burden of basic school supplies mostly on the parents and teachers.

“It’s expected that the families now go out and buy more supplies for their child than they used to need to buy,” said Sharon Hengy, the community center’s assistant director. “That’s impossible when most are just trying to put a roof overhead.”

Hengy was sitting inside a big yellow school bus parked outside of the Spokane Valley Tomlinson Black real estate office at Pines Road and Broadway Avenue, where employees donated 100 new backpacks full of supplies.

The distribution is broken down by grade level, and different kinds of supplies are needed for each backpack that will be distributed to children. The middle school backpacks, for example, have protractors, while the elementary school children will get a pencil box.

“The greatest needs are backpacks, binders and scissors,” Dalpae said.

She also said any donated backpacks should be large, because many of the children who use them may move around a lot.

“The backpack is more for some children than just school,” Dalpae said. “If they have to be removed from the home, they pack a backpack. If they are homeless, they put their belongings in them.”

The community center will help provide more than school supplies to struggling families.

The center has helped Harrington with the resources to find work, get her own apartment and get back on her feet. Other services include a clothing bank and emergency help with utilities, rent, prescription drugs and other expenses.

Any leftover school supplies will be distributed to children throughout the year through a program for homeless children, which is also located at the center. The program, called HEART, is a coalition of three Spokane Valley School districts – West Valley, East Valley and Central Valley – that provides educational support to students in temporary or transition housing. The supplies also are distributed to children at Christmas.

This year, Dalpae said, the center will also try to make some of those supplies available to teachers.

“Even if a family can slowly gather the funds to slowly purchase the school supplies, by then that child is already falling behind,” Dalpae said. “And that’s what we really want to prevent.”