Highlight Color Thriving at School District In-plant

By Bob Neubauer

Copy Center Lets Teachers Teach

In the mid-’90s, Parma City School District decided to address a growing problem. Teachers at the Ohio district’s 20 schools were spending a lot of time copying their own classroom materials on walk-up copiers. Lots of paper was being wasted when they made mistakes, and machines were getting burned out from printing high-volume projects.

So the district asked its in-plant to set up a copy center. Now, longer-run projects are required to be sent to the copy center for 24-hour turnaround on the center’s six Xerox 4595s. This lets teachers spend more time in their classrooms.

“If they need 100 copies of seven pages, rather than them standing in front of a copier that they’re going to burn up, because it can’t handle that kind of volume, they’re sending it here to our high-speed copiers,” explains Ray Sposet, community outreach specialist. “It means fewer copiers in the buildings. It means fewer damages to those copiers.”

Sposet says there may have been some push-back from teachers in the early days, but by now they see the benefits of this system.

“Teachers love it,” he contends. The copy center now receives about 55,000 teacher requests a year.

A FEW years back, Parma City School District's in-plant faced a dilemma. The 13,000-student district, just south of Cleveland, wanted spot color on some of its documents, but the in-plant's equipment could not cost effectively provide it. Its Xerox DocuColor 8000 was up to the task, but page costs for spot color would be high. Likewise, inking up the shop's two-color presses would be expensive for short runs.

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Bob Neubauer Author's page

Bob has served as editor of In-plant Impressions since October of 1994. Prior to that he served for three years as managing editor of Printing Impressions, a commercial printing publication. Mr. Neubauer is very active in the U.S. in-plant industry. He attends all the major in-plant conferences and has visited more than 180 in-plant operations around the world. He has given presentations to numerous in-plant groups in the U.S., Canada and Australia, including the Association of College and University Printers and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association. He also coordinates the annual In-Print contest, co-sponsored by IPMA and In-plant Impressions.