Moon Area School District Donates Old Desks to Charity

Desks that once packed classrooms in the Moon Area School district are on their way to help impoverished students in Latin America and the Caribbean.

James Heck, director of operations for , said the last of six cargo containers left the district's campus on Thursday. The containers were filled with 1,200 old desks  -- about 700 of which the district purchased more than 40 years ago, he said. 

Heck said the desks, many of them pastel green and pink, have been donated to the charity Food for the Poor. New desks, with chairs colored bright red to match the school's lockers, have been purchased for the district's recently completed

"I think it's good that they will be used again to provide young people with an education," he said. 

Heck said he tried to donate the desks to a Pittsburgh-area school, but was unable to find any interested districts. 

"Well, we looked in our own backyard first," Heck said. "But the desks are so old that a lot of the districts would have been trading old for old." 

He said the furniture was appraised as having no resale value. 

"My options were to either give it away or put it in a landfill," he said. "And I'm really glad it didn't end up a landfill." 

During the last two weeks, trucks from Food for Charity picked up cargo containers filled with the desks and took them to various ports to be shipped. Heck said some of the containers went to classrooms in Jamaica and Guana Island in the British Virgin Islands. 

"The were pretty old," Heck said. "But they were structurally sound and safe. There was rusting around the metal feet [of the desks] and that's certainly something you wouldn't want to have on the new linoleum."

Heck said though the district was unable to sell the desks, the furniture will still go to a good use. 

"I got no response from other districts on the desks," Heck said. "But I think it's good that they are going to continue being used."