RAFT provides Colorado with “teacher’s paradise”
Some discounts are available at up to 90 percent.
A converted 29,000square-foot military warehouse in Denver is inspiring thousands of cash-strapped teachers at a low, low price.
Looking like a basic bigbox retailer, the headquarters for Resource Area For Teachers, or RAFT, offers educators operating on a skeleton budget discounts of up to 90 percent on discarded and donated items from a variety of sources, mostly corporations.
The stuff is dated but can still be used for the classroom by employing a little ingenuity.
Monica Strass’ first-graders recently used water bottles she bought from RAFT to build a set of lungs. Her class also helped construct a Martian community using styrofoam, old CDs, egg cartons, water bottles and yarn spindles. All came from RAFT, she said.
When Strass, who teaches at Crown Point Academy in Westminster, walked into the RAFT warehouse for the first time, she was agog at its size and scope.
“I was absolutely blown away,” Strass said. “I came away sold on the place. It’s a teacher’s paradise.”
The wide-open layout, complete with a customer help-desk, offers bins and shelves of blank CDs, VHS tapes, insulated lunch bags, glass microscope slides, steel-wool pads, theme notebooks and much, much more. Items are priced as low as 5 cents each.
Teachers can also stuff bags full of plexiglas, rubber and vinyl, medical and lab equipment, wire and magnets. They can collect promotional T-shirts, posters, buttons, mugs and water bottles marking a longforgotten corporate retreat or new product line.
It’s all usable and a classwide science project is a better outcome for the outdated stuff than the landfill, RAFT supporters say.
Teachers spend an average of $500 of their own money every year on classroom supplies, Strass said. RAFT keeps her expenses low while offering other benefits, including professional support and development at a classroom next to the RAFT warehouse.
For that, Strass pays $25 for a yearly membership.
“Without RAFT, I’d be very poor,” she said. “Plus, these are materials that kids can use and get an hands-on experience on building something. They make that connection.”
Strass is among 3,600 educators who regularly shop at RAFT, a non-profit, started by an elementary school teacher. RAFT employs seven people, while hundreds of volunteers clock thousands of hours sorting donated material and packing items into activity kits, RAFT’s executive director Stephanie Welsh said.
Last year RAFT diverted almost 30,000 cubic feet of waste from landfills in Colorado, Welsh said.
“All of what we do is fueled by people helping and working with teachers,” Welsh said.
Welsh is a lawyer who started working for RAFT when she saw how hard teachers worked to help her children succeed. “That’s when I realized teachers are my heroes.”
RAFT also provides a teacher work space called a “Green Room,” filled with supplies and tools like laminating, Ellison die-cut and bookbinding machines.
“It’s a safe place where teachers can work and experiment,” Welsh said. “They can do what they want because these days teachers don’t need more people telling them what to do.”
Mary Simon was an elementary school teacher who wanted to provide affordable classroom tools and encourage hands-on learning. She started RAFT in San Jose, Calif in the 1994. It was nurtured by companies including Cisco, Hewlett-Packard Google and Yahoo! There is another store in Redwood City, Calif.
A visit to the RAFT store in San Jose inspired John and Carrie Morgridge to provide seed money to replicate RAFT in Colorado. They hired Welsh and in August 2009, RAFT opened its warehouse on Blake Street.
RAFT moved to its current location at 3827 Steele Street in 2014.
It has attracted about 84 corporate material donors, including Ball Corp., Crocs, Outward Hound and the University of Colorado.
The Denver Broncos also chip in, Welsh said. “Their stuff is always popular.”
RAFT, through its programs and materials, have helped more than 270,000 students in 25 Colorado counties.
The group hopes to do more through its RAFT-OnWheels program. A van will travel the state to provide workshops, memberships and a box of take-away materials for teachers to immediately use in their classrooms.
RAFT-On-Wheels visited 16 cities and towns from Alamosa to Hugo last year. Kristin Meyer hopes the van will visit the Eaton Early Learning Center, where she teaches pre-schoolers.
Her school doesn’t get state funding and it’s not eligible for many grants. So the pricing at RAFT keeps her classroom afloat with new ideas and materials.
“I’ve never spent more than 10 bucks at RAFT, and I’ve come home with bags of stuff,” Meyer said. “Without RAFT, I don’t know what we would do.”