HOLLYWOOD — For seventeen years, the shortage was scissors. It is the shortage no more.
“Two thousand three hundred and eighty pairs,” said Yolanda Brister, 58, reading the number off a clipboard in the church basement off Franklin Avenue, where the pallet of composition books has been joined, since this newspaper described her supply drive’s perennial gap two Mondays ago, by a wall of scissors. “Blunt-tip, five inch. They come in the mail. They come in grocery bags. A man double-parked on Franklin on Tuesday, put a case of sixty on the table, and left before anybody got his name. I have been doing this since 2009 and I have never seen anything like it.”
The drive needs roughly 900 pairs to meet the school lists. The remainder — enough scissors, by Ms. Brister’s arithmetic, to carry the drive through 2028 at least — has been boxed and labeled and stacked in a storage room behind the choir robes, making this, as of last week, the first drive in its history to begin a school year ahead on scissors.
Some 300 of the donated pairs are left-handed, a detail that briefly stumped the sorting floor until one of the three retired teachers who volunteer there pointed out that left-handed children exist, are issued the same supply lists as everyone else, and have been silently making do with right-handed scissors since scissors began. The left-handed pairs now go one to a school box, with a note.
Not every act of generosity could be accepted. A downtown wholesaler offered, in a gesture everyone involved describes as sincere, a full case of pointed shears — the kind the district’s lists specifically prohibit for the lower grades. Ms. Brister declined them with a thank-you note that she reports took her three drafts, “because how do you explain to a generous man that his scissors are too good?”
The scissors having answered themselves, what remains short is what was always short underneath: money and evenings.
The money is for the expensive items no one thinks to donate — chiefly the scientific calculators one middle school’s list requires, which cost more than the rest of that student’s bag combined. The drive buys them in bulk, and the gap this year stands at about forty calculators.
The evenings are Wednesday and Thursday, the 12th and 13th, when the laminated grade-by-grade cards come out and every one of the 1,200 bags is filled, checked by a second person, zipped, and shelved by school. Thirty volunteers a night is a good night. Ms. Brister would like forty.
“The bags don’t know about the scissors wall,” she said. “The bags only know if somebody filled them.”
Distribution is Saturday the 15th at the church, from nine in the morning, one bag per child present, no form, no registration, no questions. Classes resume across the district the following week. Efraín Cordero, who has run the distribution line for six years, will run it again — after which his attention turns to a different piece of paperwork, the county inspection of his Selma Avenue fruit cart, scheduled for the 28th under the city’s new vending rules.
“One line at a time,” he said.
Donations of cash and volunteer evenings are taken at the church on Franklin through Thursday. Donations of pencils remain, as ever, unnecessary, a sentence Ms. Brister has now asked this newspaper to print in two consecutive stories.
And the scissors?
Ms. Brister looked at the wall of them for a moment.
“The scissors are handled,” she said, with the particular calm of a woman who has waited seventeen years to say it. “Tell Hollywood thank you, and tell them a five-year-old can only hold one pair at a time.”