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Schools

D231 to Add New Fleet of Printers, Saving $22k

In an effort to cut printing costs and help the environment, Evergreen Park Community High School District 231 proposes one solution for all its printing needs.

Literary critic, playwright and co-founder of the London School of Economics George Bernard Shaw once said, “Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue and abiding love,” but did he ever consider the cost of printing?

Take , for instance, where the same ideas are expressed on printed paper as much as they are in the notebook.

At a regular meeting last night, Superintendent M. Elizabeth Hart told the board that D231 will save $22,000 if they switch from multiple suppliers to a single solution, Chicago Office Technology Group (COTG).

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The district currently spends roughly $8,200 per month on printing; the new cost will decrease to about $6,300 per month once the district makes the switch.

To find out their real cost of printing, D231 hired COTG to audit their printing system throughout the high school.

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“We learned [from the audit] that we need more oversight,” Hart said, “to actually see what we're printing and copying, so we can be more efficient.”

Hart also recommends the district hire COTG as their “one solution” for school printing, eliminating the three vendors the district currently uses, and other companies the district outsources to.

As color copies and ink usage are reduced, the school's environmental footprint will also shrink, Hart added.

EPCHS will purchase 62 new laser printers and seven new copiers through COTG.

The new printers will allow D231 to print their academic calendars from the high school, something the district originally let vendors handle.

Hart noted that plans to remove printers from classrooms, another way of cutting costs, won't happen because savings are not that significant, Hart said.

CTOG based D231's monthly savings on the high school's average: 200,000 black and white copies and 4,000 color copies.

When asked by Patch if the district considers e-books a viable option to help reduce printing costs, Hart responded: “It's very expensive. We have thousands of textbooks, so just buying them [to replace textbooks] is just unbelievable.”

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