School In-plant Brings Yearbooks In-house

The DCMO BOCES print shop staff shows off some finished yearbooks and coil bound materials that they produced. Left side, front to back: Jeanette Sutton, Annette Bagnall-Graham, Heather Conklin, Frank Oliver and Kevin Beers. Right side, front to back: Bill Closs, Shelley Gibbons, Robbie Moore, Spencer Stone and Eric Moore.

What started out as a simple mission soon became something much larger for Frank Oliver. His goal was to make school yearbooks more affordable to students in the Delaware-Chenango-Madison-Otsego Board of Cooperative Educational Services (DCMO BOCES), where he serves as print shop supervisor.

In years past, the 16 school districts of DCMO BOCES were paying as much as $80 per yearbook. This price tag rendered many students unable to purchase a memento of their year. To combat this issue, Oliver took steps to turn the yearbook creation process into an in-house job. The in-plant began printing the insides of the yearbooks with its two Ricoh Pro 7110 color printers using 80-lb. gloss text paper.

“We still had to send out for the hardcovers, which ran $10 per cover,” notes Oliver. What’s more, he says, they had an “old look” to them. They were not in full color, but had foil stamping. Plus, the BOCES districts had to pay for any dyes that were used.

To remedy this, Oliver first purchased an Alpha­Doc from Spiral Binding to automate punching for schools in the DCMO districts, thus cutting the cost of outsourcing this work and saving money for the next steps in the yearbook creation project.

Then Oliver purchased an ODM Case Making System to create the yearbooks more efficiently. He was able to generate enough revenue to create the entirety of the books onsite. The cost of print and assembly had shrunk to under $5 per hardcover book.

The DCMO districts are in rural communities without much money to spare, but thanks to Oliver’s operation DCMO BOCES brings in $1.8 million of revenue. The shop prints items like newsletters, calendars, brochures, business cards, envelopes, NCR forms and, of course, student work, which amounts to 37 million copies per year.

The in-plant further saved money by bringing shredding services in-house when it added an MBM Destroyit 5009 Cross Cut Shredder from Spiral Binding. This eliminated the cost of sending materials outside for shredding.

Much More Than ‘Viable’

Because DCMO BOCES is a nonprofit organization, the in-plant returns its surplus revenue back to districts according to how much they spent for services. Though Oliver was originally concerned about this project being a “viable service” it has become much more than that.

Doors to new opportunities have opened and Oliver’s operation has grown into an incredibly successful print shop. Now, printing in-house has given Oliver and his 13-person staff creative control over yearbooks. He has brought in more jobs and created new opportunities for his district.

Seventy school districts and 12 municipalities have reached out to have their materials printed by the DCMO BOCES in-plant. The shop now prints cookbooks and literary arts magazines. Oliver hopes to produce diploma covers and school apparel in the coming months.