Lots to Like in Lolo When This Moving Sale Starts
If you want some new furniture for the kids' room, or maybe a nostalgic piece to remind you of your own school days, this weekend will be the opportunity for some bargains.
Lolo School, which is in the process of moving into a brand new building this fall, is hoping to thin the load by offering a sale of surplus school equipment this weekend.
The district started moving as soon as class let out for the summer.
"Our staff stuck around for a few days. All of our teachers and a lot of our support staff, and we went and boxed up everything that could conceivably be boxed," Lolo School Superintendent Dale Olinger explains. "About 1500 boxes in a little over 3 days, and that doesn't account for all the furniture and things like that. So our staff did a really heavy lift for that first week. And that got us a long way toward being able to be move ready."
Right now, every hallway is full of things being stored to move with more stored in the gym.
"We're going to continue to stage items here at the school so that come the 1st of August, around there, we'll be able to move in kind of a large fashion, hopefully, move into the new school. But if not, we intend to move over there and then deploy from a central location at the new school, Into the classrooms," Olinger told me this week while showing the stack.
"Our school board has invested in some newer and nicer furnishings for the students and the teachers, but we are still salvaging quite a bit and moving a lot of things over. So we want to make it nice because it's a brand new facility and we want to make it nice for the community. But we're also trying to be budget conscious and reuse those things that still have a lot of life in them."
Friday from 8 am to 4 pm, and Saturday from 8 am until 2 pm, you can shop the surplus during a "yard sale" at the upper gym off Highway 93. As you would expect, there are a lot of desks and "kid-sized" chairs, but also various fixtures, including a massive gas grill.
"We'd like to believe that there's still some life in some of those old things. But we've got several hundred student desks and chairs and some kitchen equipment that doesn't fit in the new school and bookshelves and classroom items," Olinger says. "There are all kinds of things that just don't really have a home in the new space that we'd love to give a second life if people would like to come and exchange that for a little cash."