Sweet Home High School students will soon be sitting more comfortably, thanks to a seat-of-the-pants transaction that involved former and current school staffers.
That would be SHHS Head Custodian Darren Schultz and former science teacher Dr. Harrison Neal.
Neal moved earlier this year to Western Oregon University, where he is now an assistant professor of education and leadership.
According to Schultz, Neal became aware that the university was planning to get rid of more than 200 desks.
“Apparently, these desks weren’t meeting the standard for the state,” Schultz said. “They were basically just going to scrap them.”
Neal contacted the facilities manager at the university and mentioned that Sweet Home might be interested in the desks.
“He planted the seed,” Schultz said. “I got an email stating that they had them if we wanted to get them. It just goes to show you how good it is to have good connections, you know, don’t burn bridges. If he hadn’t been in a position to say, ‘Hey, Sweet Home might need those…’”
Schultz got busy “pushing the right buttons and poking the right people” and was able to procure a U-Haul for a couple of days, which is how long it took to haul 215 desks from the university in Monmouth. That’s enough desks to provide new seats for nearly one-third of the students in the school.
He said that the closure of the school on Dec. 17 gave him and his staff extra manpower to go after the new desks.
“That allowed us to really take some extra people from maintenance, jump in another truck, and basically, we had a convoy going back and forth for Tuesday and Wednesday.”
Shultz said that the high school is due to replace desks which, he guessed, date back to the 1970s and 1980s.
“They’ve gotten their money’s worth out of them,” he said.
“Those desks (from WOU) are $300 a piece, so if you do a little quick math, you can see that’s a little over $60,000 worth of desks and they’re nicer than the ones we’re working with in the classrooms.
“In fact, I talked to the teacher (in a nearby classroom) and I said, ‘You’re getting new desks.’”
He said the acquisition was particularly timely.
“We’re getting to that time where we’re gonna need to spend some money on desks, and not just student desks, but teachers desks,” he said. “So it couldn’t happen at a better time. It feels good. It’s gonna save us a lot of money.”