It was like an episode of a TV game show: “You have 45 minutes to canvass this warehouse. You can keep anything you take off the shelves and haul away yourself.”

Three intrepid South Panola High School teachers hit the office supply jackpot when they made a trip to the ACCO /General Binding Co. warehouse in Booneville one hot day in August. English teacher Jackie Sergi had heard about the company’s grant program and had applied for SPHS. The school was selected  for the office supply give-away and Sergi was informed of the rules: “Only three people can come. Arrive on time. Wear grubby clothes. You’ll have 45 minutes.”

Sergi carefully selected brawny partners: Coach Charlie Howard and English teacher Joshua Quong.

The trio strategically plotted their snatch-and-grab caper and netted over $41,000 worth of supplies for the school from the dusty industrial park warehouse.

Their haul included bulletin boards, dry-erase boards, markers and erasers; staplers, hole punches, binding machines, laminating machines, paper cutters, projection screens, three-ring binders, bookkeeping ledgers, display boards and a mat cutter for the art department.

Sergi and crew had borrowed the old band trailer hauled behind a school district-owned crew cab pickup, both of which they filled to capacity.

When they got back to Batesville they temporarily stored the supplies in the SP ag department until Sergi made a complete inventory and started divvying up the bounty.

She actually went item-by-item, comparing the goods with the company’s catalog, and found that the value of the stuff they’d brought back was $41,196.

One heavy wooden display case was priced at $2,000.

Among the loot were 50 dry erase boards and 24,000 boxes of paper clips.

The supplies were distributed among all the classrooms at the high school.

“We tried to disburse it to everybody,” Sergi explained.

Teachers were able to stretch their allocated supply budgets further because of the windfall of free school supplies, Quong noted.

“We were freed up to spend our ‘one percent’ money on other things we needed for our classrooms,” he said.

“It helped students as well as teachers,” Sergi said. “It was a marvelous thing for them to do.”