MANSFIELD – Ever wonder what happens at schools over summer break? How classrooms get restocked with all the supplies that students need when school gets back in session?
This summer, while children in Kindergarten through 12th grade were enjoying vacation, School Specialty – a massive school supply and furniture provider with a Mansfield location – was stocking classrooms around the United States and even internationally with necessary items.
“We tell our customers, during slower periods, if they place an order with us by 2 p.m. it’ll ship the same day. And during our busy period, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, we ship everything within 72 hours,” said School Specialty director of distribution operations Johnny Cline.
From late May to early September, there’s rarely a slow moment in the 266,000-square foot warehouse, located at 100 Paragon Pkwy. School Specialty even expands into off-site Richland County-based facilities – one in Ontario and another in Mansfield – during the summer, taking up an estimated 500,000-square feet in total.
School Specialty employs 120 full-time local employees year-round, but an additional 500 to 600 are hired and quickly trained for its peak season.
“A lot of them are college students,” Cline said. “They’re home for the summer and need a job.”
Some return year-after-year for the seasonal employment, but School Specialty will start recruiting again in October for the following summer.
“We touch roughly about 90 percent of the schools (in the United States) to some level,” Cline said.
There are more than 30,000 different SKU (stock keeping unit) numbers to organize in the expansive inventory, which includes just about anything a school needs with one exception: It doesn’t carry textbooks.
School Specialty sells crayons, glue sticks, construction paper and other office and art supplies. But it doesn’t stop there. The company sells classroom furniture like bookshelves, cubbies, tables and chairs and items like board games, playsets, cooking utensils, microscopes and more. One location – not the Mansfield one – even supplies the dead animals that students dissect in their biology classes.
“We’re probably known in the community as the big warehouse,” said human resource manager Tim Dove. “But we do everything from designing classrooms … schools and laboratories and furnishing the building with anything inside the walls … And we are maybe a little less know for those things.”
School Specialty can design an entire school, explained Douglas Barnd, the director of operations for furniture and equipment. The layouts show everything from where desks could be placed to where a flag might be hung.
“They literally do space planning for the entire building,” Barnd said. “They completely design the classrooms, music rooms, administration offices.”
Through its “21st Century Safe School Concept,” School Specialty designs new schools to be safe with features like lockdown window shades or the ability to lock a door with the push of a remote button.
“We work with customers to help not only design what the classroom looks like, but also to make sure it’s safe,” Barnd said.
School Specialty is headquartered in Greenville, Wisconsin. The Mansfield-based School Specialty warehouse, which houses the company’s sales support and handles furniture orders, was purchased by School Specialty in 1998. The building on Paragon Parkway was constructed four years earlier by the Beckley Cardy Group, also school supplies provider.
The walls at the warehouse are decorated with framed art projects from local schools and large, brightly colored pillars resembling giant crayons.
Dove says it’s a fast-paced, but fun place to work. He recalls taking someone for a tour around the building once.
“They said, ‘How can this not be a fun place to work? You sell crayons,” Dove laughed.
As schools open, things will slow down at the School Specialty warehouse. Orders come in year-round, but Dove and the others will use these slower months to prepare for next year’s busy season.
