HOLLYWOOD — The shortage, every single year, is scissors.
“Pencils, we drown in pencils,” said Yolanda Brister, 58, standing in a church basement off Franklin Avenue between a pallet of composition books and a folding table stacked four feet high with donated backpacks. “Crayons, fine. Glue sticks, people are generous with glue sticks. But the list says blunt-tip scissors, and a five-year-old cannot borrow a pair of scissors from a classmate who also needs scissors, and every August we are buying them ourselves at the last minute with money we wanted to spend on something else.”
Classes resume across the district in the middle of the month. Ms. Brister’s drive, which began in 2009 as a card table in the church parking lot with 40 backpacks on it, has a target this year of 1,200 filled bags, distributed on the 15th to families at six elementary and middle schools between Western and La Brea. As of Monday morning she had 1,140 backpacks and enough contents to fill somewhere between 700 and 800 of them, depending on how strictly you read the school lists.
The strictness matters more than an outsider would guess. Each grade at each school issues its own supply list, and the lists are not the same. One school wants wide-ruled paper through third grade; another wants college-ruled from second. Two want a specific size of dry-erase marker for the little whiteboards the students use at their desks. A middle school asks for a scientific calculator, which costs more than the rest of that student’s bag combined and is the reason the drive’s spending has roughly doubled in six years.
So the basement operates as a sorting floor. Volunteers — 30 or so on a good evening, a mix of parishioners, high school students working off service hours, and three retired teachers who arrived once and never stopped coming — fill bags against a laminated card for each grade at each school. A finished bag is checked by a second person, zipped, and shelved by school. Mismatched donations go into open bins along the far wall, which is where the pencil surplus lives.
“We used to just put good things in a bag and hand it over,” said Efraín Cordero, who has helped run the distribution for six years and also operates a fruit cart on Selma Avenue. “Then a mother told us her daughter cried because everyone else had the right notebook. So now we do it the annoying way.”
The drive’s growth has not been strategic. It has mostly been what happens when other drives stop. Two neighborhood programs that used to distribute supplies wound down after 2020, a third moved to a distribution model that requires families to register online in advance, and each time, Ms. Brister said, the families simply appeared at the church, because the church does not require anything of anybody. There is no form and no residency check. Her only rule is one bag per child present.
That openness produces the day’s hardest moment, which is not running out of bags — she has never run out of bags — but running out of the right bag. Last August she gave a sixth-grader a fifth-grade bag and a promise, and spent that evening driving a calculator to an apartment on Kingsley.
The gap this year, she said, is the same as always and slightly worse: cash for the odd expensive item, and volunteers for the two evenings before distribution. What she does not need is more pencils, a sentence she asked to have printed exactly that way.
Asked whether it bothers her that a church basement is doing this at all — that six schools’ worth of families depend on a card table that grew — Ms. Brister squared a stack of composition books and considered it for a moment.
“It bothered me for about four years,” she said. “Then I decided being bothered wasn’t filling any bags.”
The drive takes donations at the church on Franklin weekday evenings through the 13th. Scissors are blunt-tip, five inches, and she will take every pair anybody has.