Tools to Schools

In the past couple of weeks, we’ve been busy with delivering to Webb, our first middle school that we’ve worked with. Thanks to the donor who had previously given us office furniture, Decision Resources, we were able to obtain additional supplies. So far, the deliveries have been smooth and successful. However, we waited until it was a little late in the year to contact and organize our deliveries to Webb, so the weeks in which we’ve been working on delivering have coincided with the dreaded AP exams. This has made scheduling a much greater challenge and has forced us to better our time management even more as we get busier with studying.

As always, logistics have also been a difficulty for us. Some of the pieces we are delivering are especially large and heavy, which makes it hard for us to fit them into our cars. To make matters worse, both Kimmy and Emily drive super cool Priuses, which aren’t exactly moving vans. Lisa comes to the rescue with her awesome 2007 Honda Pilot, but it’s still no match for the gigantic desk that we needed Kimmy’s dad’s truck to transport.

From the difficulties that appeared, we learned that we need to be flexible with other people’s schedules. Because we need Kimmy’s dad’s help with transporting some of the supplies, we have had to make our plans around the times that he’s available. As well, we learned about asking for help. For almost all of our deliveries/ supplies pickups, we have had to ask our families and friends to take time out of their day to help us with transportation. So far, everyone we have asked has been super helpful which has been greatly appreciated.

Next, we will deliver supplies again to Webb Elementary. We still have to deliver two file cabinets, a desk, four rolling chairs, a projector screen, a bookshelf, and three staplers. We finish our last deliveries this week, one on Thursday and one on Friday. Kimmy’s dad is planning to help with the transportation of the desk tomorrow. We don’t have very much time for these next deliveries so we are hoping they will run smoothly. After that we are done with the class for this year 🙁

We’ve delivered to three more teachers since our last blog post! We picked up some office supplies and furniture from Decision Resources, our donor, and delivered them to teachers at Andrews and Barbara Jordan Elementary schools. We had a few difficulties with scheduling–for example, we accidentally scheduled one of our deliveries on a late start day without accounting for the schedule change–and it was often hard to find a time when we were available at the same time as the teachers we were delivering to. Our other biggest challenge was the logistics of transporting materials. Unlike the Asuragen supplies, the Decision supplies included larger objects like desk chairs and whiteboards, so we couldn’t just pile everything into Kimmy’s Prius like last time. Thankfully, we were able to fit everything in with Kimmy’s dad’s truck and Lisa’s Honda Pilot.

We had a slight fiasco with one delivery unfortunately. We were delivering rolling armchairs, which have arm cushions that slide off. Once we arrived at the school, we noticed that one of the chairs was missing an arm cushion because it had fallen off in the car. The teacher was super understanding about it, but we had to return to the school the following week to deliver the chair arm.

From all of this, we’ve learned to be much more thorough with double checking everything we do, from plans with teachers to looking over the supplies before we deliver them. We’ve also had to improve our problem solving skills in dealing with the logistical challenges of our deliveries. On a more exciting note, we’ve started to realize that hard work pays off. It took a lot of work to make successful contact with teachers and donors, but getting results out of doing so has been motivating.

As the year comes to a close, one of our main focuses has been on evaluating our progress. In the next few weeks, we hope to get our survey out to all of the teachers we’ve delivered to and analyze our responses. We also plan to try and contact more teachers from another school so we can find a home for remaining supplies that we still have. Overall, though, we feel like our timeline for the year has worked out pretty well, which we’re happy about.

P.S. Check out @lasahighschool on Twitter for a shoutout to Tools to Schools!

After emailing many teachers from different Title I schools, we got some responses! Five teachers contacted us with interest in the supplies. We spent the past couple of classes emailing them back with pictures and descriptions of specific requested supplies, and with potential dates and times for delivery. We also worked on planning a time with Decision and we are going to pick up the materials on the day off, Friday, March 30. We’ve tentatively scheduled our deliveries for that day through the following week.

While previously we’ve talked about how timing has been the main setback for our group, the past few weeks we have mainly struggled with deciding how and when to deliver all of the supplies to the schools. It’s been difficult to find times where Decision, the schools, and our class are at the same time. Additionally, we hadn’t thought of the transportation problems we may face once we were able to make a business contact. While we are very thankful that Decision gave us supplies such as chairs, podiums, and cabinets, we realized we didn’t know how we were going to transport such large items in our cars (yikes!).

However from these last two weeks, we learned more about planning and organizing. From having to contact the teachers for the best times to deliver to them to having to contact our contact from Decision for the best times to pick up supplies, we’ve gotten better at managing our time to accommodate others. Solving the logistical challenge of transporting the supplies also was a learning experience. The opportunity to practice dealing with logistics was a good one because it’s likely an issue we’ll continue to face with this project.

In the next two weeks, we will mostly be focused on delivering the Decision supplies. We also may try reaching out to teachers from additional schools, as not all of the items we have are claimed yet. Additionally, we’ll continue to contact businesses and potential donors to maintain our influx of donations.

In the past few weeks, we have been working to plan another delivery of supplies. We began building up our inventory after one of our contacts from Decision emailed us back detailing the inventory she has, which includes items like tables for classrooms, chairs, and bookshelves. We still have leftover Asuragen supplies that we didn’t deliver to Akins that can be delivered to a different school so these are also on our updated inventory. Aside from collecting new supplies, our group has emailed new businesses for potential partnerships, and emailed all of the Title One schools in Austin again with a link to our inventory and description of our project. We are now starting to reach out to individual teachers and this has led to a positive outcome because within five minutes of emailing some of the Barbara Jordan elementary school teachers we got a response so we are on track to make our next delivery! As Tools to Schools grows, we hope that we will find more schools that are interested and more businesses to help!

A struggle we still face is the slow timing. While we’ve emailed multiple businesses, we repeatedly receive no responses. Additionally, with the schools we’ve followed up with, we’ve again had little success. However, we will keep following up with more schools and are working on emailing individual teachers who are more likely to respond than principals who we understand are very busy. We have learned that even if we are unsuccessful the first time, we must try to find new ways to contact schools and businesses. While sometimes it’s discouraging, we try to have a positive attitude and remember that at some point because of our efforts we will get a reply, which drives us work hard on furthering our project.

In the next two weeks, we plan to email individual teachers in the Title One schools which we hope will increase our chances of getting a response. Then we will start on creating plans for another delivery of supplies. Currently, we are focusing more on contacting schools than businesses since we already have a large inventory, but if we complete a successful delivery we plan to refocus to making businesses connections again.

These past couple weeks have been full of success for Tools to Schools! More specifically, we made our first delivery to Akins High School, with the lab supplies courtesy of Asuragen, Inc. We planned out the delivery pretty well beforehand, so it went very smoothly and didn’t take long. Since then, we’ve been working on getting ready for our second donation and delivery from another business, but are still waiting on the details of what exactly we will be picking up. This is one of the challenges we’ve been dealing with–because of the nature of our project, we often are faced with long waiting periods as companies sort through their materials and schools take time to reply. This slows down the progress of our project.

What we’ve learned from this continual struggle is how to strike a balance between being obnoxious by sending repeated reminder emails to businesses and schools and not being attentive enough. In the past, we’ve sometimes been hesitant to follow up with contacts for fear of being annoying, but we feel that we’ve learned the adult conventions of when is an appropriate time to send a follow-up. We’ve also built some confidence in our organization now that we’ve made a delivery!

In the next two weeks, we plan to move towards scheduling our second delivery and putting the preparations into that. We also hope to reach out to more businesses so that we can potentially start working on a third delivery. We are going to try to ask teachers for any connections they may have, having surveyed parents already. The timing of all of this has been slow in the past because we often don’t receive replies from businesses and schools, but we hope that having made a delivery will give us a boost and increase our clout.

Hello Tools to Schools! Since we last updated you, we’ve been working on reaching out to the parents who responded to our survey. We received two emails via our Tools to Schools email, one of whom was interested in donating supplies from her business which is downsizing, and the other who offered advice of other businesses we could potentially partner with and offered supplies of her own. After seeing the suggestions, we began researching the potential business 7 partners, TOPS Office Supplies and Austin Creative Reuse. Additionally, we contacted Akins high school with the help of Ms. Wilson, and got in touch with the science department director at Akins who said she would contact her fellow teachers/coworkers about what materials they are interested in. Now we are waiting for that response so we can set up an actual time to deliver the supplies!

A common setback that has been occuring in implementing our project is receiving responses from people we have contacted. While people were willing to partner with us, so far when we have followed up about when we could meet up they haven’t responded. Additionally, we were hoping that the survey would get us more contacts, but unfortunately we only have two which while we are very grateful it wasn’t as successful as we had imagined. This problem is not as much a time management problem (we are able to finish our Wicked Problem Project assignments on time), but more of a problem where we have just been waiting for a long time to hear back.

A good insight that we’ve learned from our work for these two weeks is that we have to persevere and keep trying new ways to reach out. In our last blog post, we were disappointed that no one had responded to the principal’s message, but since then as we previously stated we had responses! While we haven’t had a steady way of gaining new business partners, because we have been working hard to come up with creative ways to find businesses, we have been somewhat successful in making new business relations.

In the next two weeks, we will keep sending out emails to potential businesses. We also hope to transport and deliver the Asuragen supplies mentioned earlier and contact Barbara Jordan Elementary about potentially donating the supplies from the downsizing business to them. We also may try to get in contact with more schools, because we only had a few fill out our initial survey for teachers last semester. Hopefully more school-business partnerships will be underway!

Hello Tools To Schools fans! Since our last blog post we have been emailing businesses, reaching out to schools, and contacting potential people to help move our project forward. We emailed multiple businesses explaining our project and asking if they were interested. We also presented our idea and progress to our class and guest. During this our group talked about our idea and the struggles we encountered when trying to find local businesses to contact. One suggestion we received after this presentation was that we should ask around the LASA community to find people that would be interested in participating in our project. So we created a survey and message specific to these parents, sent an email to Ms. Crescenzi (the LASA principal) and then she sent it out in her weekly email.  

A setback to our success in implementing our project is that we thought we would have more success in obtaining more business connections through the survey we sent out in the principal’s message, but so far we have received no replies. Since we have only been able to contact one business, Asuragen, we haven’t been able to accumulate as many supplies as we had anticipated previously. While finding good connections with businesses have been difficult so far, we hope that in the future we can come up with a good system of contacting them. Additionally, one of our members has been gone for a Model UN conference which has made it a little more difficult to discuss as a group our plans for the future. This hasn’t impeded our progress too much, but we’ve found that our group is more productive and focused altogether.

Through this process we have learned about the challenges that come with trying to start up a new program and have it be successful. In these two weeks, we have focused on working to contact businesses, finding their emails and trying to come up with more creative ways to find contacts such as the survey. We have learned that starting a new organization is much more difficult without having business contacts readily available.

In the next two weeks for further implementation of our project, we plan to decide which school we will donate the Asuragen supplies to–probably Akins High School, since they gave us the most responses–and contact their science department to initiate the donation. We hope to do this through Ms. Wilson, our teacher sponsor, because as a chemistry teacher she has connections to teachers there. We will also continue reaching out to LASA parents and businesses in general to try to secure additional sources of donations. If we are successful in this, we will contact more schools that could use the supplies.

Despite the difficulty we’ve encountered with Tools to Schools, we are hopeful about the future! We predict that completing our first business-school connection with Asuragen will kickstart our progress as Tools to Schools becomes better known and more reputable.

Since we last posted, we have finally started implementation of our project! Last time we blogged, we were working on creating our pitch, which we have finished and can be found on our website. Currently, we have begun contacting schools from our list of lower income schools, and we have gotten 38 responses so far! We are amazed to have gotten so many replies so quickly and are glad that people want to help us with our project!

So far, we have contacted about 16 schools, and we plan to contact 5 businesses by December 8th. In the emails to the schools we included our survey which we hope will be sent out to teachers so we can learn exactly what they need for their classrooms. Additionally, we will begin counting inventory of the supplies that we’ve received from Asuragen, and we are in progress of receiving binders from another company. Hopefully since now we have inventory we can start to deliver the supplies in the near future.

In the next month we will be gone for winter break and finals, so most likely we will continue our implementation in January. We plan to keep in contact with the schools and businesses, as well as hopefully delivering supplies. We want to ensure that we can give at least one delivery of supplies to each school by the end of the year once we have received replies from businesses. As well, in the future we plan to communicate with “Supply the Schools,” who are willing to work with us on our project. This is an AISD group that emailed us because they have a similar goal and process to help the teachers in Austin.

In the past few weeks, we haven’t faced many time management issues! We were successful in posting our pitch video, and we have met all of the requirements on our rubric – we have been on time with all of our assignments! The only setbacks may be that since we don’t have school from December 19th to January 4th, we will lose valuable class time that could have been spent on furthering our implementation. While we were worried about receiving responses since we are unable to control if schools and businesses will contact us back, so far we have gotten quick replies to our emails and surveys!

It’s been a few weeks since we’ve blogged, so a lot has happened since our last post! We finished the draft of The Proposal and went through the peer editing process with it, so now that has been finalized. Now that we’ve done much more detailed planning on our project, we are essentially ready to begin implementation. In fact, we’ve already made contact with our first business: Asuragen, a medical research company. Asuragen has a surplus of lab equipment because of the nature of their business, which we plan to bring to middle or high schools in need of lab tools.

This week we planned out our pitch. We are going to make a 60 second video using the whiteboard drawing technique. Last class we wrote out a script and this really helped clarify our project because we could only include the most important parts. Hopefully by creating this video it will encourage businesses to partner with us.

For next session, we hope to record the voiceover for our pitch video, and start filming the background of our video on a whiteboard. Hopefully we will complete that next session so that afterwards we can start editing the video! Start looking out for the release of our pitch within the next couple of weeks!

In the next few months, we plan to begin implementing our project, starting with contacting businesses for supplies. Later on as we build contacts with the businesses, we will contact local schools to start to pair the two together. We will contact teachers across the district in order to figure out what supplies they actually need in their classrooms.  By the end of the project we will have contacted multiple businesses and schools; also we will have delivered supplies to the schools.

In these past few weeks, we’ve learned a lot about time management! October has a reputation for being a jam-packed month both academically and with extracurriculars for LASA students, so we have at times struggled to balance our work on Tools to Schools with other schoolwork. Additionally, the biggest challenge of this week specifically is that all three of us are going to miss class on Friday (Oct 20), so we lose about 1.5 hours of worktime. However, we feel that we are on-track timewise with our project. So far, we have been good on completing our assignments on time, but in the future we may have difficulty in doing so. Since our progress relies on getting responses back from businesses, we don’t have as much control over our time.