Reuse & Recycle: Sullivan County BOCES

Overview

Upstate New York is served by 32 Boards of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES). Encompassing multiple school districts, each BOCES manages services which are most cost-effectively provided at a scale larger than a single district. Among these is cooperative purchasing.

The Sullivan County BOCES includes 8 rural school districts on the Pennsylvania border, about 100 miles northwest of New York. Meteor Education is a major supplier of furnishings to the BOCES, and through it to the eight individual school districts. Refreshing a number classrooms for district schools, the BOCES found itself with several hundred surplus desks, chairs, and other items. In addition, over time the BOCES had accumulated many other surplus items, unlikely to be used again, and sitting in storage.

Meteor’s Joe Laura introduced the thought of reuse to BOCES’ Deputy Superintendent Susan Schmidt, and after learning about Meteor Education’s and IRN’s capabilities, Ms. Schmidt readily agreed that reuse was a much better idea than throwing usable furniture in the landfill.

By the Numbers

Implementation

BOCES staff collected the furnishings in a multi-bay garage at BOCES’ operations center in Liberty, NY. IRN retained a crew to pack the furnishings into trailers, and BOCES offered use of a forklift to make loading easier. The furnishings filled two 40-foot overseas shipping containers, scheduled mid-morning and early afternoon. These were dispatched from the container port at Elizabeth, New Jersey.

The furnishings were accepted by IRN’s longtime charitable partner, Food for the Poor, which provides disaster relief and economic development in countries throughout the Caribbean Basin. They were shipped to FFP’s central warehouse in Jamaica. From there they have been paired with other furnishings and distributed to FFP projects in multiple countries.