Through Love INC, community helps meet back-to-school needs

Gazette-Times

In a cafeteria packed with school supplies and volunteers happily giving away bags of those supplies to Corvallis teachers, 6-year-old Maggie Hartley might have had the happiest job of all.

Maggie was posted inside a corral filled with any sort of ball a gym teacher could require: Basketballs, volleyballs, soccer balls, rubber balls. A gym teacher would step to the outside of the corral and request a couple of balls. That's when Maggie would go to work.

"We can't reach the middle," said Maggie's father, Mark, "so she's tossing them to us."

It was all part of Friday's School Supply Drive for Teachers, which the Corvallis group Love INC has organized since 2003. Churches and businesses donated supplies - this year, nearly $80,000 worth of goods. On Friday at Linus Pauling Middle School, teachers wandered past tables stocked with supplies and picked out, at no charge, what they thought they could use in their classrooms. About 300 teachers took advantage of the event.

As always, said Wilma Van Schelven, the executive director of Love INC, new teachers got first shot at the supplies. Jean Dick, who will start teaching music next week at Lincoln School, was among those new teachers filling a paper bag with supplies.

"This is terrific," Dick said. "I don't have to go shopping. I don't have to fill out a lot of purchase orders. I can get everything at one stop."

"Everything" wasn't much of an exaggeration: Supplies available for the taking on Friday included pens, markers, paper clips, posters, board games, stickers, sticky notes, scissors, markers, notebooks, construction paper and hundreds of boxes of tissue, among other items - not to mention those balls.

The giveaway started in 2003, after a period that was marked with "a lot of acrimony" between teachers and the community, recalled Beth Lambright, a board member for Love INC.

The question then for Love INC's board, Lambright recalled, was "what can we do to show teachers that the community cares about them?"

That first giveaway, held in the offices of the Corvallis-Benton Chamber Coalition on Second Street, attracted 13 teachers and about $3,500 worth of goods.

Among the witnesses to the hundreds who showed up at Friday's giveaway was Jeanne Holmes of the Corvallis School District.

"It's a wonderful expression of support from the community for our teachers," Holmes said. For teachers who are used to scrounging for supplies or reusing them whenever possible or, in some cases, paying for them out of their own pockets, the giveaway is a bonanza - and it's one, Holmes said, that the district deeply appreciates.

"It was just like stepping inside a room full of love for our teachers."