School Districts Reclaim Space and Turn Surplus to Cash

Recently the Purchasing and Warehouse Supervisor of Merced County Office of Education, Chuck Hergenraeder, had a dilemma; he had been storing three 15 passenger school buses (circa 1980) that were no longer suitable for school district use and he needed to reclaim the space in his bus yard. Hergenraeder had previously worked with a company called InterSchola to dispose of several smaller surplus items and remembered the success of that venture. Hergenraeder contacted his local representative and from that point on, InterSchola took over management of the sale of his busses via online public auction. A church in Texas won the busses at auction for a significantly higher price than Hergenraeder would have been able to generate by his own efforts.  Within a short period, three members of the church drove from Texas to pick them up. A delighted Hergenraeder said, “More important than the money received from the sale of the buses, was the ease of the process; the only effort on my part was to make a call to InterSchola. They did the rest. It was great!”

School districts from San Diego to Northern California are struggling with budget cuts and looking for ways to be more efficient with their limited financial and personnel resources. InterSchola has partnered with many agencies, such as Merced COE, to offer a helpful solution.  InterSchola gives California school districts and other local public agencies an alternative way to manage the “end” of their asset lifecycle by providing a full service solution to help these agencies sell their surplus goods via eBay. Districts dealing with full warehouses have found that InterSchola helps manage the sale of their surplus inventory from start to finish.

Ron Bennett, President of School Services of California, the premier business, financial, management, and advocacy resource for educational agencies in California said, “InterSchola frees up staff time by expertly handling the entire surplus inventory and evaluation process. Their service is a tremendous help to busy school administrators plus there is no cost to the district. In fact districts actually receive dollars from the sale of their surplus. In a time of budget concerns, the service is very valuable to schools.”

San Jose Unified School District’s Pat Day works with InterSchola on an ongoing basis.  Due to budget cuts, Day wears many hats as the District’s Director of Maintenance, Operations, Purchasing, and Contract Management. When Day first learned about InterSchola, the district’s warehouse was overloaded to the point that the district had begun to fill several additional storage containers. Many items – including old pianos and several tons of rock salt used in water softeners that had long ago been replaced – had been sitting in the warehouse for ten years or longer. Not only did InterSchola sell much of the District’s inventory to make room in the warehouse for future shipments, they even sold the temporary storage containers that were no long needed as a result of the successful sales. A surprised Day said, “It was amazing what sold. InterSchola even managed to find a buyer for an old water truck that leaked so much, there was no water left by the time it reached its destination.” When asked if the money was helpful to the district Day replied, “Making money from selling unneeded items is not our mission, educating students is OUR mission. Still, unusable inventory takes up valuable warehouse space and impedes efficient warehouse management. With the help of InterSchola, my staff now has more time and resources to focus on our core mission of providing an excellent learning environment for our students.”

About InterScholaTM
InterSchola was established in 2004 to help school districts with surplus inventory realize the value of these assets while at the same time freeing up expensive storage space and valuable staff resources. InterSchola’s unique model is designed to eliminate the headaches associated with surplus disposal by managing the public auction process from start to finish and ensures compliance with complex legal Education Codes. Items sold have ranged from pianos to printing supplies, from computers to cars, and from food service to facility equipment. InterSchola has returned millions of dollars to schools, districts and other local public agencies and has helped save countless more dollars previously spent on staff, storage and surplus disposal costs. Learn more at www.interschola.com.

Links for schools to their own auctions

Some of our school clients have been asking for a way to link from their site to ours, to show items that they have up for auction. We like that, and are in the process of developing a page for each of our clients that they can link to, and only their items that are currently at auction will show. If you’re one of our clients and would like to know more about this feature, please contact your client manager.

Visit our site for more information: www.interschola.com

CASBO Workshop planning ahead

InterSchola is pleased to have been invited by the CASBO Purchasing R&D committee to help design a workshop regarding surplus assets for the 2008 annual CASBO show.  We hope to make this as informative as possible regarding options that exist for school districts to manage their surplus disposal.  Please contact us if you have any suggestions regarding how we can make this conversation as productive as possible for your needs.  We look forward to hearing from you.

Melissa Rich, President and Founder

Our bus to go see Oprah?

We sell a large variety of items to all kinds of people, and school buses have become a favorite item for many.  One of our recent sales was a very nice bus that was bought by a movie production company, who is using the bus for a national promotional tour.

The company is promoting their 1 second movie, for which anyone can be a producer by donating $1 to their cause.  They are traveling to see Oprah to ask her to contribute.  They bought a bus at auction from InterSchola, and are presently getting it ready for the trip. 

For more information about this film and their cause, visit

http://www.the1secondfilm.com/

InterSchola featured in Sanger Herald newspaper

InterSchola was featured on the front page of the Sanger Herald last week.  It was a nice article that showed how Sanger’s old surplus band uniforms were purchased by an InterSchola customer, then donated to school in China that needed them.  Here’s a link to the article (as a pdf file):

  http://www.interschola.com/SangerHeraldArticle.pdf

Welcome to InterSchola’s Blog!

Welcome to our InterSchola Blog.  Here, members of our organization will share information about how public school and local public agencies can maximize the value of their no longer needed surplus items – such as food service items, technology assets, vehicles, maintenance equipment, school supplies, classroom fixtures, sports equipment, musical instruments, shop equipment (woodshop and metal shop), portable classrooms, office equipment etc.

InterSchola is fast becoming the most sought-after provider of turn key services and solutions for buying and selling SURPLUS education property (durable goods) though our online marketplace for such products. In a nutshell, InterSchola is helping education institutions sell their surplus assets on eBay. We are seeing phenomenal results of auctions of surplus goods on behalf of these institutions and we have a great deal more demand to work with other education and non education institutions as well as buyers of all of our asset categories – technology, food service, vehicles, facilities and maintenance equipment, shop equipment, sports equipment etc.

As budget challenges and demographics cause significant shifts in the education landscape, it becomes increasingly important for school districts to keep a close eye on their budget resource allocations. Extracting extra dollars from no longer needed district assets through the public sale these assets is one way to supplement limited education budgets. The InterSchola marketplace further provides a means for local schools and districts to sell excess or idle equipment and supplies to other school districts nationwide that are forced to meet new and existing standards with limited increase in overall funding.

To date, InterSchola has returned almost over $1M to our school clients and helped them save countless more dollars that were previously spent on labor, storage and waste disposal costs thus allowing them to use this money to fund other education expenditures to improve the learning environment for K-12 students!

InterSchola understands that education and public agency personnel must focus on their respective core missions to provide public services to their constituencies. InterSchola relieves the burden of managing the disposal/sale of surplus assets for our clients in compliance with relevant regulations to enable our clients to focus on their primary day-to-day responsibilities while creating a valuable new source of revenue for these same clients.

InterSchola’s corporate mission as a full service provider of surplus asset management helps K-12 schools and districts realize the benefits of a more efficient educational inventory management/ procurement process, incorporating best practice business solutions through the creation of a secondary market for education assets. The creation of an effective secondary market will generate new K-12 school revenues.

Further social benefit will be gained through the reduction of premature disposal of assets. InterSchola’s eBay market solution as well as our scrap and recycling channels will extend the lifecycle of these assets and greatly reduce the volume of materials that have historically been sent to local landfill due to lack of existing resources to handle effective disposal by other means.

Effective Surplus Disposal Eases San Jose USD’s Burden

Patrick Day, then the Director of Purchasing and Contract Management of San Jose Unified School District (SJUSD), faced a familiar problem for education institutions – surplus disposal. His district was paying too much money to have its surplus items taken to a local dump. For the remaining surplus equipment that did have value, such as pianos, food service equipment and swimming pool pumps, the district had no effective model to capture the remaining value in these items. As a result, surplus items were piling up in his warehouse. Moreover, Day knew that with a number of school closings pending, the surplus pile – and its associated problems – would soon be growing.

In March 2004, Day attended a presentation by InterSchola at the Santa Clara County Office of Education. InterSchola offered a full-service solution to help school districts dispose of surplus assets, using eBay – the world’s largest auction marketplace – as its primary sales channel. InterSchola understood that most school districts have neither the time nor the proper resources to effectively manage surplus asset sales. Moreover, InterSchola demonstrated how existing venues for surplus disposal did not maximize the value of school districts’ excess property. To Day InterSchola seemed the perfect fit for SJUSD’s surplus needs.

An InterSchola representative visits the SJUSD’s warehouse to perform a complete inventory of surplus items, at the district’s request. InterSchola evaluates assets for feasibility of sale, tests equipment, takes digital photographs and gathers item-specific details. After sending documentation to ensure that SJUSD posts necessary public notice in accordance with California Education Code, InterSchola lists the items for public bid on eBay. Upon auction close, InterSchola collects payment from buyers and returns to the district to package and ship sold items or meet buyers for local pickup.

InterSchola’s services have become an essential part of SJUSD’s warehouse operations. In any given month, InterSchola may work with items from the district’s Transportation Department, Food Service Department, and/or the Buildings and Ground Department. A sample of items sold through InterSchola include 34 upright pianos, multiple pallets of salt (formerly used as water softener in the district), and a large quantity of kitchen equipment declared surplus when the district centralized its food service operations. “Our work with InterSchola started out as a new venture,” says Kelly Cefalu, SJUSD Supervisor of Operations and Warehouse, “and now it is a well-oiled machine.”

In two years, InterSchola has sold over $100,000 worth of surplus items on behalf of SJUSD. “InterSchola’s services have freed up my district staff to focus on more pressing items”, says Day, now SJUSD’s Director of Maintenance/Operations/Purchasing/Contract Management. “We don’t want to be experts at selling stuff. We want to be experts at educating kids, and InterSchola allows us to focus on the bigger picture.”

Letter from the President – June 2007

June 16, 2007

Greetings from the floor of eBay Live, eBay’s annual user conference in Boston Massachusetts.  Several members of the InterSchola team were in Boston June 14-16^th to share stories with eBay executives and eBay community members about InterSchola and to gain valuable strategies and selling tips from 3 days of live seminars taught by eBay staff.  We got a lot of great information to share with our buyers and sellers to further improve our selling results and our client and customer experience.  

 I wanted to share a few of the highlights from our eBay Live experience with you, our clients.The business and industrial, technology and vehicles (eBay motors) categories on eBay are seeing tremendous growth in terms of both supply AND demand on eBay.  These categories include many of the asset categories that InterSchola sells on behalf of our clients (maintenance and operations equipment, buildings and grounds equipment, food service equipment, facilities supplies, office equipment, technology, maintenance vehicles, buses and passenger vehicles). 

These trends bode very well for InterSchola clients that have these items to sell. There was significant discussion regarding listing strategies, start prices and eBay psychology.  Economists and psychologists agree that the strategy of setting low opening prices to spur interest is a significant factor in increasing sell through rates and final values in the online auction environment.  InterSchola has certainly seen the benefits of listing strategies using lower start prices and we encourage our clients to allow InterSchola to use these strategies to the fullest! 

InterSchola received strong accolades regarding our success to date as an eBay Top Seller (top .001% of the eBay seller community.)  We also received great praise regarding our positive feedback rating, our high average selling prices and our stellar average sell through rates (>70% on eBay)! 

My colleagues and I had ample opportunity to meet with senior executives of the eBay community during the 3 day conference to share information about our unique model of working with schools and other local government agencies.  There is tremendous support and praise for the work we are doing to help schools convert idle assets into much needed cash.  We look forward to further strengthening our relationship with eBay to the benefit of our clients!

Melissa Rich