WVSD maintenance and custodial crews make thousands of whiteboards for students

The West Valley School District had a problem.

It wanted to give a whiteboard to each student to use while learning online at home, but whiteboards are in short supply and difficult to find. So the district asked maintenance and custodial director George Castor to make some.

The district ordered two units of whiteboard material, with 30 sheets of material per unit, and Castor got to work.

“We just sent up an assembly line and started cutting them,” Castor said.

The boards are 12 inches by 12 inches. Some employees cut them out, others rounded the edges to make them easier to handle and others used an air compressor to blow off the dust and packed them for distribution.

The seven employees managed to produce 4,000 whiteboards in a single day.

“We had them out the next day,” Castor said.

The district also purchased 230 dozen markers to distribute with the whiteboards. The boards and markers were handed out during the one-on-one meeting that each student in the district had with his or her teacher, district spokeswoman Sue Shields said.

“That’s how we got them to the kids,” she said.

The whiteboards are small enough that they fit easily on a desk next to a computer. The district thought handing them out would make things easier for students and didn’t want to ask parents to try to find them on their own, particularly since they’re in short supply, Shields said.

“When they’re learning online, they can draw on the whiteboards and hold it up to show everyone their work,” she said. “It was one of the things we learned in the spring.”

Castor’s staff has also been busy making customized sneeze guards for the front desk of each school building in the district. While students are learning at home, the staff of each school is physically in the school building during the day.

The maintenance department created wooden frames of various sizes to accommodate the sneeze guard materials. Efforts were made to match the color of the wooden frame to each desk.

“Most every school was custom made, depending on the desk and how big it was,” Castor said. “Some of them have a pass through for documents.”

It’s not unusual for Castor to make things schools and teachers need rather than buy them.

The biggest reason is that it’s usually cheaper that way. The whiteboards were a good example, Castor said.

“The boards, even with the man hours, were quite a bit cheaper,” he said.

Sometimes what the district wants can be hard to find, particularly now.

“This year, even if you wanted to order, everything was on backorder,” Castor said.

The department also made all the stand-up desks in use in the district. The desks can be quite expensive to buy, so Castor’s department just ordered the metal legs and they made the desks themselves, Shields said.

The staff in the maintenance and custodial department are proud of their ability to make just about anything the schools need.

“We’ve got great carpenters,” said maintenance grounds employee Sam Bachman, who helped make the whiteboards and sneeze guards.

Online classes for the district began on Monday.

The goal is to eventually get students in the classrooms as COVID-19 restrictions ease, starting with elementary school students first, Shields said.

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Nina Culver can be reached at nculver47@gmail.com.