For most people, if you need a pencil or a binder, it’s a quick trip to the store or an even faster click of a button. But what if you need hundreds of pencils or electronic devices for a classroom? That’s where Canyon School District’s Purchasing Department comes into play.
“Our department handles anything a school could need,” says Canyons Purchasing Director Nancy Webb. “Whether it’s student furniture, food or pencils, contracts, special education counselors, or even medical insurance.”
Webb says CSD’s purchasing agents are there to help schools and teachers secure the best possible prices for everything from basic needs to larger purchases. As classrooms update and evolve, some items are upgraded or no longer needed, and the department has come up with a way to ensure they don’t go unused.
Public schools are funded by taxpayers, which means everything they purchase, be it a desk, chair, vehicle, or piece of playground equipment, is considered public property. Because of this, schools are required to follow state laws to recover value from items that still have life in them.
If a school, for example, retrofits a classroom to serve as a faculty room, and they have leftover desks, they’ll fill out a form to have the warehouse retrieve and store the items until they can be placed for sale on a public surplus site.
The items are first made available to other schools and departments for use in classrooms and offices. If they aren’t immediately spoken for, they’re made available for purchase, or bid, by the general public. Employees can also bid for items on the public site for their own personal use.
“For instance, we’ve had a lot of iPads this year,” Webb says, “they were part of our initial sale test. Any money that is made on surplus goes back to the [District’s] General Fund, which goes straight back to the schools. So, it really helps our schools as well as the public, because they can get a nice deal on some of these things.”
Among the hot-ticket categories in surplus have been pieces of art that Canyons inherited from Jordan District and were later displaced when older school buildings were renovated. From oil paintings to photo prints, Canyons has seen a variety of mediums hung in school hallways. One of the latest items is a charcoal rubbing of three horses from a temple in Thailand.
“These were popular in 1960s,” says Holly Bishop, Purchasing Technician who has been in charge of cataloging and photographing the art. “They were outlawed by the country because eventually what they were seeing was these rubbings were destroying the surface of the stone. So, these are no longer done and so here we have this piece from about 1960, right before it was outlawed. It somehow ended up in our collection in the warehouse and may be one of the last ever done.”
Canyons District employees who are interested in items can contact the Purchasing Department for a specific link and specialized code. The community can access items on the Public Surplus website and choosing Utah and Canyons School District to “browse auctions within area.”
