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Local volunteers loaded hundreds of surplus school desks, chairs and tables into two semitrailers headed south for use in other schools.
More than 50 students and adults with Rock the Edge youth group and Southwestern Youth Services spent three hours Saturday morning loading the 80-foot trailers with the furniture stored in the district’s bus garage and the former Luverne Kawasaki building.
The semitrailers arrived from Orphan Grain Train, based in Norfolk, Nebraska.
According to their website, OGT is a Christian volunteer network that ships donated food, clothing, medical supplies and other needed items to people in 69 different countries including the U.S.
When David Hansen with Helping Hands for Haiti learned surplus school furniture was available from Luverne, he contacted OGT to transport the items that would otherwise be scrapped.
“Education is so important for communities to pull themselves out of poverty,” he said. “It (having an actual desk) is such an advancement.”
Word of Luverne’s available surplus came at an ideal time for the Irene, South Dakota, based organization.
The group is organizing a free school near their current mission in Haiti where several students use homemade desks made from 1-by-12s and six to seven students share the space.
After loading Saturday, the two OGT trucks and trailers stopped in Nebraska before heading to Texas where the surplus furniture will be sorted and delivered to schools.
Hansen said Luverne’s furniture will go to places other than Haiti where political unrest currently prevents distribution and where U.S. travel is banned due to the pandemic.
Instead, the furniture will be distributed to other areas where it is needed now. Supplies to Haiti will be fulfilled at another time.
The surplus school furniture is a result of a two-year $30 million remodeling and construction project currently in its last six months at the middle-high school.
The entire building, which opened in 1956, received updated furniture to go with the new decor.
Although the style of the surplus school furniture is outdated, all the items loaded Saturday were deemed usable by the volunteer organization.
Three additional semitrailers will be loaded with Luverne school furniture at a later date and distributed.
“We are unbelievably blessed in this country,” Hansen said. “We are more than excited how things worked out.”