If parents get harried when buying their children’s school supplies, imagine the stress for the people who sell them.
Educational Aids, based in Schaumburg, has spent the last six weeks, 12 or more hours a day, filling the orders of parents and teachers across the country racing against a looming deadline: the first day of school.
Now, Jack and Judy Cerman, owners of Educational Aids and the Learning Post retail stores, cast weary eyes over their Schaumburg warehouse, where colorful products spill from 10-foot-tall shelves.
There are compasses and pencils, flash cards and posters, alphabet trains and sunflower growth charts.
There are workbooks that give tips on cursive writing and others that show how to make art out of garbage.
Educational Aids booms from July to September, and business at the warehouse dips to a trickle the rest of the school year.
After 20 years in the northwest suburbs, the company is one of the oldest classroom suppliers in Illinois.
The ups and downs of school enrollment have for the last few years remained on the up, landing Educational Aids in a growth market that industry experts say will only get better.
The classroom-supply business is a good one in the northwest suburbs, where mobile classrooms are springing up to accommodate an overflow of pupils and administrators are considering opening shuttered schools. In 1997, many area districts saw record enrollment highs.
The trend is borne out in the rest of the country, and education-supply industry experts expect it to continue for the next few years.
The $6 billion-a-year education-materials market has seen some of its best times during the last several years of a booming economy, said Adrienne Watts, spokeswoman for the Silver Springs, Md.-based National School Supply and Equipment Association.
Membership in the group has doubled to 1,500 members in the past decade, she said. About 3,000 school-supply distributors and retail stores exist nationwide.
Parents are the main engine in the industry’s growth, Watts said.
“Parents are a lot more involved in education, making sure a child is successful and getting whatever materials they need to help the child succeed,” Watts said.
“Flash cards and workbooks used to be geared to teachers, but now they are made for parents or grandparents,” she added.
The Cermans, both former teachers in Wheeling District 21, began Educational Aids in 1976 by opening up a Learning Post store in Buffalo Grove. At the time, only two other stores, in Chicago and Skokie, carried teacher supplies.
“It was our entrepreneurial spirit,” said Judy Cerman. “We were young, we had no worries and we never thought of the future. Now, 22 years later, it’s still a wonderful business.”
With three Learning Post stores, Educational Aids is considered a midsized supply company, Watts said. Most such stores, about 50 nationwide, are independent startups by former teachers.
Thousands of Educational Aids’ catalogs are shipped nationwide several times a year.
But time has shown that catalog sales are no longer the bread-and-butter of the business.
About 60 percent of the Cermans’ sales come from the Learning Post stores, which in the past decade have been joined by dozens of other teaching-supply stores in Illinois.
In the industry’s infancy, catalog were the backbone of the business as school districts ordered in bulk and distributed supplies to individual schools.
Now, principals and teachers often make the key purchasing decisions that were once reserved for district administrators.
This site-based management system has given teachers the opportunity to choose classroom supplies and teaching materials according to their own interests and tastes.
Teachers who buy supplies often do so out of pocket, to be reimbursed later by the school.
“Teachers are cautious spenders,” said Jack Cerman. “They expect to walk out of a teacher store with a wheelbarrow full of stuff for $20.”
Cerman said that a decorative bulletin board set cost $3.95 in the 1970s and would sell for $6.95 today.
At an education-supply convention earlier this year, a new series of workbooks were introduced that are $4 to $10 cheaper than what had been available.
They are now flying off the shelves at the Learning Post and in teacher stores across the country, according to the NSSEA.
Educational Aids makes up for the inexpensive nature of its products by sheer bulk. On average, it sells 75,000 pencils during a two-month season.
