Despite Chromebooks being standard issue at GBHS, teachers have had to make shifts to afford the most basic school supply: paper.

In the 2023-2024 school year, for the first time, the budget for paper ran low fairly quickly. Most of the budget for paper was used up by the end of the first semester, which means that the budget for copies would have to be almost doubled if copies were continued to be made at that rate, according to Grant Adams, a Spanish teacher at GBHS. 

“Within the first couple of months, we would just burn through so … much paper and burn through a ton of ink that it was a school concern,” Adams said. “It’s forcing teachers to be more strategic and not abusive, and that’s just my mindset. I think if you know that it’s available, you’re gonna abuse it. I think that’s our human nature, if you know you have a lot, you’ll spend a lot, but if you have the mindset of ‘I don’t need to spend that much or use that much,’ then you’ll choreograph your lifestyle around that.’”

The teachers had to revisit the amount of paper they were using, and department heads and administrators had to look at the budget. The budget was adjusted so that the departments now have to pay for paper out of their department budgets. 

“Previously, the office purchased paper as needed from the portion of the budget dedicated to running the office. There was a large increase in paper usage that used the annual budget in less than half of the time. To avoid running out of money, the responsibility for paper was shifted to each teaching department to purchase their own,” Greg Sloan, the principal of GBHS, said in an email.

Each department gets their budget, and they can decide how to spend that. The budget for each department is mostly a fixed number for the whole year, so they are careful about how they spend it. The budget is mostly decided by the number of teachers in the department and the historical needs of the department.

Brandon Dell’Orto, the head of the social science department, has also had to make adjustments to the assigned budget of this department. Dale Mortensen, another teacher in the social science department, and Dell’Orto bought paper for the department, and Dell’Orto stored it.

“This year, we started with us paying for it out of our department money,” Dell’Orto said. “I would like to go back to the idea that the paper is just in the office. You use it, you keep track of it by department. The department then pays for it, however, as opposed to what we’re doing now, which is each department’s got to buy their own paper and hold their own paper.”

The department heads mainly oversee department budgets. They usually ask the teachers in their department what they need and then place orders or sign off on purchases. 

“The department chairs have the final say, but each teacher gets to buy what they need,” Shane Jackson, the head of the special education department, said in an email. “Each teacher gets a budget and if we need something major we work together for the department.”

There was a cut to the budget of the whole school, which also led to a partial restructuring of the budget. The departments’ budgets were affected less than that of the entire school, but the cuts led to some changes, especially with so many late enrollees and 10 new sections being added.

“Our general budget started close to over 10% less than the prior year,” Sloan said in the email.

Damien Lawrence, the head of the science department, has also noticed the reduced budget, but it is not as much of a concern for this department, which has a robust budget due to the cost of the lab materials. If a department needs a lot of supplies that have to be replaced frequently, they receive a larger budget allotment.

“The overall budget for Granite Bay has continued to shrink and is the smallest of the comprehensive high schools,” Lawrence said. “I don’t think that we have single items that are just really expensive that are being paid for by the school, but I think it’s just the fact that we have one of the smallest budgets of all the high schools, and so it’s easy to spend a lot of money in a lot of different places.”

If a teacher feels that something is needed for their class that is more expensive than a common item, then they would go to the department head and ask them to sign off on the cost. 

Many departments and teachers have tried to restructure to consume less paper, but for departments where that is a difficult task, they have revisited their budgets to make sure that they have paper. 

There are several things that the departments have decided to do on paper, such as the notes in math since there is no textbook for Integrated Math (IM) 1, IM2 or IM3 and the new “doodle notes” in freshman biology, which are a sort of “textbook” that students attach to their notebooks and can use on tests. The teachers in these departments decided that it was worth the extra expense because of the added benefits of doing these assignments on paper. 

“It’s fair enough that certain departments make a lot more copies than others, and as such, they should probably bear a little more of the burden,” Lawrence said. “I’m just gonna take some of the money that I might have spent on a different lab or now we’re gonna use them in something that we think is better for student learning.” 

In the past few years, the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI), and its widespread use has raised concerns about the integrity of digital assignments in a world that is increasingly electronic. 

“In the past, people thought we were getting away from using paper and going more toward Chromebooks, but then ChatGPT has made it clear that any assignment you put on a Chromebook can now just be plagiarized,” Lawrence said. “Currently, we are allocating money to paper, which you know, over the course of a term, could easily be, you know, $1,000 to $2,000, depending on how many copies are being made.”

Many studies show that paper learning is better for students’ retention. Paper learning is also effective for students’  grammar and spelling because they don’t have autocorrect and have to pay attention to how they are spelling words. Sensory contact with paper has been proven to help students do assignments, retain information and help them not get as distracted.