A Screaming Deal

[October 28th, 2009]

ILLUSTRATIONS: Jonathan Hill

Michael Bradford stood inside Portland Public Schools’ vast, subterranean warehouse last week pecking at his iPhone with an index finger.

As Bradford Googled the retail price of unused basketball hoops, the look in his eyes combined the excitement of a bargain shopper with the intensity of an investor hoping to turn a quick profit.

On Oct. 22, Bradford was both.

In an effort to clear space in its main warehouse across the street from the Rose Quarter, Portland Public Schools hosted a two-day “surplus sale,” auctioning materials that district administrators decided they didn’t need. Included were seven basketball hoops still in their boxes that Bradford was hoping to resell on eBay.

Selling hoops isn’t the typical transaction inside the headquarters of Oregon’s largest school district. But neither is it unusual. The sale, which followed the rules for Oregon public agencies to liquidate assets, was at least the fourth of its kind this year at cash-strapped PPS.

Surrounding Bradford were 105 “lots,” individual items like tables and band saws or pallets of miscellaneous electrical supplies. The lots were advertised for a week in The Oregonian and on Craigslist, then on view for two days. Bidders interested in the items wrote down how much they would pay for each lot on their own ballots. They then dropped their ballots in sealed envelopes into a box. The bids were opened at the end of the second day, and the winners were announced on the spot so bidders could never know if anyone else was bidding on a coveted item—or how much they wanted to pay.

The two-day process earned the district $6,357. But it may have cost the district the trust of some teachers.

Sale items reflected, in part, how much has changed since all PPS middle and high schools taught home economics and industrial arts. In one corner sat a pallet loaded with hundreds of sewing-machine needles, dressmaking pins and bobbins. In another corner, wood blocks overflowed from a box once intended for a shop teacher.

But sprinkled among those aging objects were materials many teachers in the financially strained district would still consider valuable: reams of photocopy paper, five laser printers, compasses, softballs, basketballs, utility carts, desks, photographic development chemicals, an electric kiln, a box of maracas, African-American dolls, Pyrex test tubes and 32 cases of toilet paper.

“Every year teachers spend, on average, $600 from their own pocket on classroom supplies,” says Rebecca Levison, president of the Portland Association of Teachers union. “I’m certain much of what was sold teachers would have used in their classrooms.”

The toilet paper surprised even Bradford, a 42-year-old real-estate speculator who hunts for sales like PPS’s on websites such as auctionzip.com. He then stores his bounty in storage lockers until he can resell the goods.

“Why are they getting rid of whole boxes of toilet paper?” Bradford asked. “They’re not going to use that?”

Although it was, in fact, for sale, the district’s schools might have used the bath tissue. The 32 cases of toilet paper, which retail for about $1,800, brought $325 to the district through the auction.

PPS says all items had been discarded by individual district departments, and it was up to those departments to donate the items on their own if they wanted them to go to schools.

Meanwhile, photocopy paper is almost worth its weight in gold at many campuses.

The week before school started, Bill Wilson discovered he had nearly 40 students in his chemistry class at Grant High School. He rushed to copy more handouts for his class, but discovered in the photocopy room there was no paper in the machine. “These are tools of the trade that we need for our job,” says Wilson. “You would think there would be some process to say, ‘Hey, can anyone use this?’”

District spokesman Matt Shelby acknowledges “room for improvement,” but says there’s currently no mechanism to tell teachers what’s available.

WW bid unsuccessfully on the kiln and photocopy paper in an effort to recover them for teachers. Bradford, who won the paper for $100, later agreed to sell some of it to WW for donation to a PPS teacher. So if you’re a PPS teacher who needs that paper, post a comment explaining why on the online version of this piece at wweek.com. We’ll pick the best entry and announce the winner next week.

^They Sold What?

Here’s Some Of What PPS Put Up For Auction Last Week.

Item: Seven brand-new basketball hoops
Approximate Retail Price: $489.93
Winning Bid: $140
The Bidder’s Plans: Sell the hoops on eBay.

Item: Used Skutt electric kiln
Approximate Retail Price: $2,500 new, or at least $950 used on eBay
Winning Bid: $56
The Bidder’s Plans: Keep it for personal use, she says.

Item: A pallet of paper, including photocopying paper and lined paper
Approximate Retail Price: $850
Winning Bid: $100
The Bidder’s Plans: Give most of it to his son’s Catholic school. The rest he’s selling to WW to return to teachers.

Item: 1997 GMC Blue Bird 71 school bus with 129,181 miles and a new engine in 2005
Approximate Retail Price: $3,550 on eBay
Winning Bid: $1,010
The Bidder’s Plans: PPS pulled it after discovering it had been misidentified; it does not have a new engine.