OUR VIEW: As we go paperless, is it for right reasons?

We have suffered greatly for over a month now. The powers that be have taken an important part of our educational process away, and it has affected everyone. The news spread like wildfire when the first student realized he could no longer print and each day became more of a tragedy.

After initially being given no reason, the word in the hall is now that people print too many things they don’t need and paper costs a lot of money. Here’s a look at the math:

An average ream of paper = $8 (500 sheets). There just over 700 students currently enrolled. Say each student printed just two pieces of paper a day for the entire school year = 1,400 pieces of paper in one day. 1,400 pieces of paper in one day X 180 school days = 252,000 pieces of paper a year = 504 reams of paper a yearX $8 a ream = $4,032.

That’s not such a big price; however, people were using much more paper than two sheets a day, and students were not the only ones printing. English and math classes hand out on average eight pages a day per student. Do that math, and a much larger number will appear on the calculator.

We can all agree that maybe we’ve been printing a little too much and had gotten quite lazy. A majority of the population is guilty to printing to the wrong printer and then leaving work across the building due to laziness. Unnecessary pictures being printing of students’ significant others, etc. needed to be put to an end. However, the big debate isn’t whether we need to cut back or not. The problem is that our priorities are not straight. Conservation of this green planet should trump the financial issues when it comes to limiting the accessibility to print. This, unfortunately, is not the case.

Have we, not just as a school, but also as a society, become so wrapped up in saving money and lowering our budgets that we have forgotten to do things for the simple reason that they need to be done?

Cutting back on our paper usage is a good thing, not just for our pocketbooks, but the environment as well. As nice as it sounds, going entirely paperless in a school setting at this time, is not realistic. While what technology can do is astounding, it is still not trustworthy enough to use solely for all assignments.

Since going completely paperless is such an unlikely task right now, our school needs to look for alternatives to saving paper and money. Finding a better way to regulate what students print would be ideal. With that aside, there are still several ways to cut down. Teachers and students, as they are already doing, can explore different programs available to turn work in through an online outlet like GoogleDocs and GoogleClassroom. When copying more than one page, teachers and students could double-side everything using the same amount of ink but half the paper.

We could easily recycle all the paper we end up using schoolwide.Those two pieces of paper a day would recycle 252,000 pieces a year. Multiply that times a more accurate number, and we’re saving forests.

Maybe recycling doesn’t save us all that much in the bank, but it does help preserve the environment and that is really what it’s all about. We can’t print the money to spend if all of the trees are in the back of a garbage truck: unrecycled. Saving money and paper are important, but where is our true focus? We will eventually get over our outrage of not getting to print every little thing, but this planet is the only one we have for the forseeable future. Destroying it is the real tragedy.