Taylor Communications donates school supplies

A local company with a long-standing tradition of being community oriented recently made a generous donation to Hendricks Elementary School, just in time for the 2019-2020 school year.

Taylor Communications, now in its 51st year in Shelbyville, challenged its staff to donate school supplies over the summer. The employees were encouraged to do better than another Taylor Communications facility did in 2018.

And they did.

“I think we probably doubled what they did,” said Jill Berling, accounting administrator for Taylor Communications in Shelbyville, with a big smile.

Berling has known Hendricks Elementary School second-grade teacher Michelle Karmire for many years so she felt comfortable bringing all the supplies collected to her for distribution. They arrived late last week.

On Monday, Berling, Mark Pohovey, plant manager, and April Wethington, customer service, visited Hendricks Elementary for a photo opportunity with Hendricks principal Deryck Ramey and assistant principal Colleen Fosnight.

The idea was simple, according to Pohovey.

“We have an employees activities committee and we were talking about things we can be doing and Jill came up with the idea,” said Pohovey. “We all talked about it and decided it was something we would like to do.”

“Taylor Communications has a newsletter that they put out,” explained Berling. “Each month they send it out to all the different plants to see if they’ve done anything in the past month. I noticed last summer one of our competing plants that kind of does what we do had a nice big table of school supplies.”

Locally, a box was set up in the middle of the Shelbyville plant and employees were encouraged to contribute.

“We gave it a little bit of publicity on our bulletin board and talked it up at our plant-wide meetings and this is what happened,” said Pohovey.

Karmire arranged many of the supplies on a table outside the school’s cafeteria. Paper, pencils, markers, glue and more all were stacked neatly Monday afternoon, which caught the attention of many of the students as they passed by on their way to their next class period.

Karmire admitted she had already started passing out the supplies and has a plan in place to visit each teacher within Hendricks to see if there are those still in need.

“Unfortunately, this is an issue that (kids) don’t have what they need on the first day of school,” she said. “So this is much appreciated.”

Taylor Communications, 1750 S. Miller Avenue, does printing work for businesses.

“Business forms primarily ... some security printing,” said Pohovey. “We’ve been in the community for 51 years now. We’re a very strong presence in the community and a very strong plant. And we are blessed with a great workforce.”