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Most of the year, Cary Weatherby is the secondhand Rose of Bloomington public schools. Even during the holidays, she's sort of a scavenger Santa.

Weatherby, 49, has spent two years organizing a free store of supplies for the teachers in the Bloomington school district. When it opens for a preview next month, the store will give away teaching materials that instructors and students need but don't get from their schools.

By scouting company loading docks and garage sales and pitching local companies, Weatherby has collected boxes of pens, file folders, reams of paper, colorful key rings, flexible rulers, lip balm, obsolete stationery, little flower pots, bushel baskets, envelopes, office furniture, desk accessories, flashcards, crayons, overstocked promotional or outdated holiday items, toys and plastic molds shaped like hearts and rabbits. That's for starters.

"I saw what was being thrown away," she said, and figured the stuff could find a better use.

She created the nonprofit Companies to Classrooms, found an empty store at Old Shakopee Road and France Avenue and raised six months' rent. Next she will set up store shelves contributed by Target. Then she plans a partial opening in January to let teachers and donors know the place is for real.

She is not getting paid for her work, although, like managers of similar stores elsewhere, she hopes to get paid someday and to hire helpers.

She ducks questions about whether it should be necessary to scrounge classroom basics and whether many teachers should spend hundreds of their own dollars a year for such supplies.

"I wonder about it, but I don't get upset," Weatherby said recently as she carried boxes from her car to the store's gaping 6,700 square feet.

"On the one side you see all the money given to schools" by government, she said. "Then I see scissors with the points broken off. I'll let other people deal with the big issues."

Ideally, said Bloomington Superintendent Gary Prest, teachers shouldn't have to buy school supplies. But he knows district budgets don't provide enough for materials, and he said dedicated teachers often can't resist buying props or rewards that can "make a particular piece of curriculum fly."

When he was an elementary school teacher in the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage district, Prest said, he shopped at the Ax-Man surplus store in St. Paul's Midway neighborhood for cheap items that might help in class -- small magnifying glasses, for example, or "little oddball things" such as smelly markers that "kids thought were great."

'It makes a world of difference'

Diana Lundquist, first-grade teacher at Lincoln school in north Minneapolis, said she spent nearly $1,000 a year on supplies and motivational rewards when she began teaching in 1981. As she has built her own cache of teaching aids, her personal costs have shrunk to $200 to $300.

It helps that she can make four visits a year to a 6-year-old free store in southeast Minneapolis. It is run by World Vision with support from the SHOPA Kids in Need Foundation. (World Vision is a nonprofit Christian relief and development organization. SHOPA is the School, Home & Office Products Association.)

In the basement storehouse near the University of Minnesota, teachers steer shopping carts through the aisles and note signs that state the maximum amounts they can take.

"It makes a world of difference," Lundquist said. She looks for tape, pens, paper, notebooks, markers and little items for her prize box to reward students who master a task or come to school everyday.

She would like more clothes on the shelves because some kids come to class without socks, mittens or hats. Sometimes, she added, first-graders need a change of underwear.

Ann Oliver and Mary Schmalz, who manage the 10,000-square-foot storehouse, said teachers usually drop by from 3 to 6 p.m. weekdays. Many arrive tired and grumpy, Schmalz said, but "when they leave they're as happy as they can be."

Teachers from 54 Minneapolis and St. Paul schools with heavy shares of economically disadvantaged children can use the store. Often they see possibilities in donated products that manufacturers never intended. Some turn blank wedding invitations into flashcards. Some turn empty back sides of company banners into fresh surfaces for student art or class decorations. Some use bubble wrap as a focusing device for special-needs children who pop the bubbles.

Oliver said teachers must agree not to sell, barter or return the free-store items. That enables donors to claim an enhanced tax writeoff, she said.

Schmalz added that whatever people think about the need to rely on outside resources, "the option is for students to sit there and not do anything."

Dan Wascoe • 612-673-4436

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