I can hardly wait to start using less paper at Clemson Elementary! All the trees we could save from being chopped down! (I do feel very close to all things that start out as SPROUTs!)
Starting November 3rd, all families that signed up for paperless communication will have a few sheets less in their Monday folders. Every Monday, they will recieve an e-mail from the school with school-wide newsletters, fliers attached to it.
Should you have any problems with the e-mails, please contact my friend, Celia (ceels@bellsouth.net). The smoother we can make this operation run, the more we can save.
Read on (my comments) to see how the system is set up.
About Me
- Sprout,
- your friendly GREEN-ing agent.
HOW TO VOLUNTEER - everyone interested: send an e-mail to gogreence@gmail.com
- Become a green parent for your child's class!
- Take a group of children to the Nature Walk!
- Come to lunch and help kids compost!
- Volunteer at "Walk to School Day"
Sprout's Shouts
- Celebrate Earth Day on April 22nd! Ask a GoGreen volunteer to come to your classroom and do a green activity. See examples in our post.
1 comment:
This is the proposal the GoGreen Team has put together:
Clemson Elementary PTA’s GoGreen Initiative proposes to go paperless (as much as possible) in this year’s school communication.
The environmental benefits of using less paper don’t need elaboration, but the financial benefits of our proposal are substantial, too.
Last year Clemson Elementary spent $14,371.37 on running copiers in our school. This amount was $4,529.37 over the amount budgeted by the school district. As you know, the overages had to be covered by the school and it was done with the help of PTA funds. According to predictions, this year the costs of copying will go even higher, approximately $2000+ higher!(There are a number of reasons for this: there are more students in the school; increased fuel prices have driven the cost of paper up almost a dollar a ream from last year, so paper alone will be almost $2,000.00 more than last year for the same amount of paper; the cost of ink has also gone up, and last year the school already spent in excess of $3,000.00 on printer ink.)
In our survey, 164 families in our school showed interest in receiving school communication via e-mail. This represents roughly one-quarter of the school body, so we can expect to decrease the above costs by at least 25%.
We believe that these benefits make it worthwhile to pursue the possibility of paperless communication. We are aware that the office personnel and teachers have in place an efficient way of distributing various school communications. The PTA will work out a way of handling these changes that puts the least amount of burden on our faculty and staff.
Here’s how we propose the transition would take place:
· A PTA volunteer will create a database with the e-mail addresses of those families signed up for paperless communications. This list will be proofed for accuracy and then given to the staff member responsible for the mailing. (Linda Knudsen?)
· A PTA volunteer will audit Laurie’s list of required copies for classes, and delete the number of paperless families from each class list. This will result in a substantially smaller number of copies.
· A PTA volunteer will use some kind of sign to mark the Monday folders for those children whose parent requested paperless communication. When the envelopes are stuffed, signed folders will not receive school wide/PTA fliers. (Class mothers will need to be instructed about this.)
· The fliers and printouts will need to be scanned in a timely fashion. PTA will request the person who is responsible for distributing the flyers (Laurie?) to collect every Friday the coming Monday’s fliers and give it to Isaac Lithicum (Ms. Nodine’s First Grade class). His mother volunteered to scan the forms and generate a pdf document for each. By Sunday night (or earlier if the staff needs it) she will forward a document with all the pdf attachments to the responsible person in the office (Linda?). She will only need to forward this prepared mail to the compiled address list from the school’s e-mail account. This involves no more than one click of the computer button.
Of course, this is a very new enterprise, so we are open to creative suggestions. We’re sure that together we can work out the best way for Clemson Elementary to go green and save paper, helping both the environment and our school budget.
This is our initial plan, please let us know your thoughts and suggestions. We would be happy to meet with you at your convenience about this initiative.
We look forward to creating a green school together!
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