The title of this post is borrowed from a quote I recently saw from Brian Kuhn, the technology leader with the Coquitlam School District. This quote struck me because 1) he is right and 2) this is a dramatic change in thinking in just a couple years.
When I spoke at Opening Day for our district in early September, I described how technology, sustainability, and transparency are three themes that are underlying the work we do, and will continue to be very influential for all operations in our district. Gary Kern, our Principal of Technology and Innovation, in speaking with our Board of Education last week, also emphasized the role of sustainability in his work as he described our district’s technology strategy for this year. While we don’t want to limit a discussion on sustainability to printing and paper consumption, it is clearly part of our commitment in this area.
Until the past couple of years, our efforts in school districts have been to make printing more convenient. What started as photocopiers in the office, spread to multiple copiers in schools, then to printers in computer labs to, in some places, printers in most rooms and at many work stations. The cost of printers came down, and the need for convenience drove changes. Until coming to West Vancouver three years ago, I had spent the previous decade with a printer on my desk.
The paper tide has been shifting. While printers have come down in price, we have become increasingly aware of the ink and paper costs that eat-up supply budgets in school districts, and sustainability has moved to the forefront of discussions. At the same time, technology has allowed us to digitally replicate activities which previously had been limited to being done on paper.
Today our school newsletters have moved to being almost exclusively digital. Even with a conservative estimate of 30 pages of newsletters sent home with each child in a given year, this savings is over 200,000 sheets of paper. This year we have also begun to move permission forms to the digital environment. In addition to the savings in staff time, just at school start-up alone, we are photocopying 30,000 fewer sheets of paper because of this one change. These changes in our business practices will only continue as our websites continue to evolve as our primary communication tool with our students, parents and community.
As teachers experiment with virtual classrooms, we are seeing more teachers taking advantage of “hand in” boxes that allow students to submit assignments and teachers to assess work without a paper copy ever having to be made.
So, back to the quote that led off this post, “printing will continue to become more inconvenient”. Over the next few years we will have fewer copiers and fewer printers. Resources that have been spent on ink and paper can be redirected in schools to other needs. I suggested on Opening Day that we could reduce our paper consumption by 20% this year. When we look to hit print on our computer, or use the Xerox, we should be always asking ourselves if we are doing this because we need to do it, or because we have always done it this way.
cultureofyes.ca 
The title is what I’ve proposed as our strategy statement here in SD43 for print related activities. When you let that sink in and start to align printer activities to it, there are pretty significant savings of paper, toner, maintenance, handling, carbon offsets, etc. The impact on teachers and others will be felt and we need to help them with the transition.
For example, at our exec meeting where Mark Clay (our energy manager) and I presented the strategy, a classic example was raised of the social studies teacher making 30 copies of their 3-page hand-out. The question was asked “how will they do this if there is such demand on fewer printers/copiers?”. The answer may be another question “why are they still copying a hand-out that kids will discard shortly afterward when it can be online for their access and use just in time?”. Culture shift is the underlying need to make a strategy like this work.
There are some very good points here and ones that we started to address in the Sunshine Coast when I was responsible for directions in technology and the use of computers in schools.
There was a time when we were encouraged to purchase more printers as the price of the hardware had dropped significantly over the years and people wanted the convenience of, as you said, a printer on their own desk, or in their own classroom. The board office alone had an almost 1-2 ratio of printers per staff member. That has changed.
We started encouraging staff to use the drop-box approach on the servers and while that moved along slowly, a number of teachers have found it to be quite convenient. As well, setting up group addresses for the parents allowed more of the admin assistants to email newsletters as well as posting them on their websites. In fact, in an effort to reduce email traffic and volumes for the parents, links to the newsletters are often sent out instead of the PDFs.
While I know there has not been any kind of cost saving analysis, I do believe the steps towards conserving paper have paid off. There is still a long way to go, though, and part of that includes parent education as to how to use the internet to respond to questions, fill in forms, and read documents online. As well, more staff need to recognize the value of the network for distributing documents to be read online and to receiving the work of students in an electronic format.
On the teacher level, we are debating these exact same things. We have different levels of committment within the department and school. Some teachers have moved to paper-less with all handouts on the website (withing portals) and hand-in-boxes while others are very slow to move.
What this is creating is an inconsistency with students. Some teachers still provide all the handouts, while others provide none. Some want to charge for value-added support materials. The students are starting to see the inconsistencies and question what is going on.
While I aplaud the efforts of teachers to make printing less convenient, there are growing pains that have developed at the classroom level…but maybe this is the storm that needs to take place???
Great post – we have recently changed our policy on printing too. This year we have only 3 printers on our entire primary and middle school campus (800+ students). We got rid of all the small ones that were based in classrooms or grade areas. All middle school students can print from their laptops, then they have to walk to a printer and put in a code to get their documents. This has drastically reduced the amount of waste – students printing out entire websites when they just wanted one paragraph, for example. Each student has a set number of copies they are allowed to make – they have to budget this carefully and think before they print as it is recorded on their code (plus they have to use their break times walking to the printer to put in their code and get out their work – it’s not so convenient for them anymore).
With our primary students they are only actually able to print if they are logged into a computer that is in one of our two labs. There is always a teacher in the lab who monitors what is printed. They can use the laptops in class but these are not networked to a printer so students have to save their work in their folders and then move to the lab to print it out. As of today in both these labs together, we have only had 23 pages of unwanted printing in the first 6 weeks of school. Last year we had hundreds of wasted pages some days, thousands of wasted pages a week because of the “just click print” attitude and if the paper didn’t appear immediately they clicked print again or even sent their work to another printer. Often lots of work would come out of the printers and nobody would bother to come and pick it up.
Our teachers are printing less too – because they now have to walk to a printer and put in a code, rather than pressing the print button and have their documents come out at a printer in their room/grade level. Although teachers grumbled in the first couple of weeks, they seem to accept this now and again are thinking before they print.
A lot of what we do this year is on-line using Web 2.0 tools. We display the student work on class web pages so there is no need to print anything out. In any case, you can’t print an animation or a movie.
Our school newsletter is sent out to parents electronically, and links to work posted on the class pages is sent to the group of class parents by the homeroom teachers as a link in an email that they can click on. Some of our teachers even have class blogs where they communicate with parents and showcase student work. I suppose the overall message is that doing the right thing isn’t always easy, but that we need to make thoughtful choices and decisions.
Today I spent time with secondary teachers who use tablets to mark assignments. The sustainability benefits were noticeable but even more impressive is the assessment for learning benefits to the students. They get timely feedback that supports more interaction between the teacher and students and potentially between students.
Thanks all for your thoughtful responses. It is still very reassuring when students have binders full of papers – this fits with what we know “school” to be. My experiences recently with students is that many still want handouts, textbooks etc. as they equate this with what class and schools is suppose to be.
It is also interesting that we still often work off of a very dated concept that we have to send paper home with equity in mind, believing that many families don’t have computer / internet access. While we know this is true in many rural areas in BC it is simply not true in the large urban centres.
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