Carla Garzón, 19, pencils out her desk design.
Look out IKEA —these desks only take a minute to build and take apart.
And they’re compostable.
New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) has received a surprise donation of 500 of these cardboard desks from Branford-based company Madison Polymeric Engineering. The desks are destined for students’ homes to help with at-home learning.
The district’s parent engagement coordinator, Daniel Diaz, is enthusiastically organizing what he sees as a win for students’ learning environments, recycling education and creativity.
Around 200 desks have gone out to school art programs and summer camps. Students can get one of the other 300 desks by signing up to the joint superintendent and New Haven Free Public Library reading challenge.
“What is the first thing parents say when they get their child a new desk? ‘Don’t scrape it.’ This is a desk kids can personalize,” Diaz said.
Danny Diaz: A desk it’s okay to mark up.
Diaz has helped students remove obstacles to remote learning throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, as part of the district’s Office of Youth, Family & Community (YFCE). When schools first closed as a Covid-19 safety measure, YFCE employees called parents, delivered emergency groceries and more.
One obstacle Diaz found is that many families live in small apartments. Parents struggled to carve out space for students to learn virtually. This lack of privacy for students led the district to repeal a policy that required students to keep their laptop cameras on during class.
The district intends to start this fall with in-person school as the only option, for the first time since March 2020. There will still be remote days though, instead of the superintendent completely calling off school on snow days.
Diaz envisioned families setting up the desks temporarily on these remote days. Families can slot together the three pieces of cardboard and set up the desk in a free corner of the room. When the remote day is over, they can disassemble the desks and put the pieces in a closet.
Cardboard strong enough to hold up Tom Bruno and Walter Maguire.
Madison Polymeric Engineering (MPE), a plastic engineering and manufacturing company, has increasingly found a niche in recyclable packaging products. The company first designed the cardboard desks roughly one and a half years ago with a British company for students there.
This spring, MPE realized the company had extra desks on hand. Tom Bruno, the company’s materials manager and a Wilbur Cross High School alumnus, immediately thought of his old high school. His boss, MPE founder Walter Maguire, had lived in New Haven in the past and wanted to support education in the city.
Maguire explained that the desk is much stronger than it looks, thanks to the honeycomb structure between the paper boards. Bruno and Maguire were able to sit on the desk together without it sagging or breaking.
The disassembled desks fill one room of the Wilbur Cross print shop.
If students do manage to break the desk, it is easy to recycle. Paper and cardboard are easier for consumers to recycle than plastic (though more energy-intensive to create).
The desks will also naturally decompose with a little water, soil and sunlight. As long as students use a biodegradable paint like water colors, the desk will decompose outside on its own.
Diaz sees these as all good lessons that students can learn through the desks.
Recent Wilbur Cross graduate Carla Garzón (pictured above) was working on her desk design while Diaz, Bruno and Maguire explained the project. The 19-year-old is working at the Wilbur Cross print shop before she heads to Southern Connecticut State University this fall to become a nurse.
Garzón carefully penciled out “Class of 2021” on a spare piece of cardboard. She said that she wanted to memorialize all the good things that come after high school.
“The best is yet to come,” Garzón explained.
Some art students have already painted cherry blossoms and other scenes on their desks and taken them home.