Kennedy High School has passed their paper budget, with over one million papers being printed this school year alone. Throughout the last couple of months, Kennedy teachers have been advised to cut down on paper use in the classroom and convert to online resources like google docs and google forms in an attempt to conserve Kennedy’s paper supply.
“Our teachers have been very, very conscious about how they use all supplies. It’s not just paper, but everything,” Associate Principal Sarah Reminowski said. “We tried to base [the budget] on what it was last year and we ended up using more. We just do our best to try to estimate what we need and go from there.”
The amount of money that the school has spent on printing papers alone is $60,000, this exceeds any other school year in history. The reason for this constant increase of paper intake is not explicit, however the pandemic may be a significant factor.
“One of the budget items that was increased this year a little bit is the copy budget. We clearly needed to put more into that again,” Kennedy Principal Jason Kline said. “The Chromebooks have played a huge role, so we’re spending a lot less on copies since then, but we’re seeing an increase since we came back from COVID, and in this year more significantly.”
Because of COVID-19, teachers migrated to online assignments since each student had their own chromebook. However, many are changing their mind. As more time passes, teachers have wanted the physical, paper copies of assignments back in front of students, causing them to use more printing resources.
“This year is an outlier,” Kline said. “We don’t know the specific cause but since we’ve come back from pandemic when everything was online, I think teachers slowly started to say, ‘I did this online, I’d rather do this on paper.’”
To solve this problem, Kennedy High School staff members are limited to printing 25 single-sided papers a day. Printers are now adjusted to monitor how much black and colored ink staff are using. If staff surpass this limit of paper and ink per day, the money will come directly out of their department budget.
Teachers have around 25 students per class on average. To give a five page test, the typical length of foreign language assessments, a teacher would have to wait five days to have enough copies to give the test to one class of students, and most teachers have six classes per semester. It is not feasible to use physical resources anymore, as many teachers teach several sections of the same class, so if they were to save up enough paper for one class, they would still not have enough for their other sections and have to create the online resources anyway.
Kennedy staff could hypothetically convert entirely to online resources, however, making physical materials digital is more difficult than it first appears. It takes hours to manually type out readings from textbooks and create google forms. Some subjects don’t convert well to online formats in the first place, like math and physics. It’s labor intensive, and adds to teachers’ already busy schedules.
To help the problem, Kennedy High School is holding a paper drive during their spring pep rally on April 4, 2025. The class that donates the most paper for the school has the chance of winning a point and getting their class one step closer to winning the spirit stick.
“We’re at a point where we’ve got two months left. This is how much we budgeted,” Reminowski said. “There’s some things that we can do in order to supplement so that we can just continue to help out.”