Readying for NOLA 2010

Today we are in the midst of getting ready to head to NOLA for our 5th and final delivery of school supplies there. It is with great sadness that we have determined that this must be our last trip down. The amount of barriers that have come up over the last few months have been quite trying, especially for a nonprofit this small.

Our past suppliers of notebooks, folders, binders, pencils, pens, etc., will no longer do bulk orders. Which lead us to investigate a variety of other sources, we looked into having notepaper printed and bound ourselves, ordering from Poland and having it shipped over, ordering in bulk from warehouse stores, ordering in bulk from office supply stores, you name it I think we looked into it. In the end, no one could match the prices for these items at the local discount store, so we have been forced to recruit volunteers to go to the store in their areas and purchase $200-$300 dollars worth of supplies at a time, then we pick them up or they drop them off and we organize and box it.

While this doesn't sound to bad, realize that the volunteers are going out to purchase 15,000 folders and 10,000 notebooks, not a small feat I assure you. In addition we are buying pens, pencils, and binders. Our second set back this year was the cost of rental trucks. Typically we have sent 1-2 semi's down with supplies ahead of us going down. the semi's unload at the NOLA Public Schools warehouse. Then we follow down in a variety of vehicles, rent trucks in NOLA in addition to a few we drive down with additional supplies.

This year the issue with this is two-fold. First, NOLA schools no longer have a warehouse for us to unload the semi's into, so we were going to drive down several rental trucks loaded with the supplies for each school already. This is when the second issue arose, in the past we were charged about $600 for the rental trucks to drive down there, this year the lowest price they would give the non-profit for 3 trucks is $1300 a piece! In addition to having to pay for the gas for all of these!

So as you can see the efforts this year have been enormous to overcome all of these obstacles. We are now looking at hiring a semi to haul the items down, driving cars down, renting trucks in NOLA, unloading from the semi in a parking lot into the rental trucks for delivery (not sure how that will work with no loading dock or forklift!).

While I continue to believe s very much in the work we are doing and the benefits to the children of New Orleans. It is so disheartening to run into this many problems and then you get an email from a principal at one of the Public Schools you have helped in the past, and she asks if you will help provide supplies for her students, now that they have just informed her (mid-July) that they are closing her public school and repositioning her at a charter school.

Disheartening to say the least! As I get ready to do residency verification and registration for my children in the upcoming weeks, I am so grateful to have the educational opportunities for them, but it brings back around the question of educational equality for everyone and why can we not achieve this?