While the toys may engage some Los Angeles students, there aren’t enough to go around: there are 519,586 students enrolled in LAUSD schools, according to district statistics from the 2021-2022 school year, with more than 275,000 in pre-Kindergarten through sixth grade alone.
They’re also not worth that much, by Beanie Baby standards.
Jennifer Marquez, senior director of product donations for Shelter Partnership, told local news outlet LAist that the nonprofit had received a call from a Chicago-based in 2020 asking if they’d accept 600 shipping pallets — enough to fill 11 semi-trucks — of the toys.
Shelter Partnership is a nonprofit that generally serves homeless shelters and food banks with donations from different manufacturers, movie studios, and other groups that have surplus items they’d like to donate.
“A company might have something that is out of season or maybe something’s going to expire in six months or they just have too much in stock and they turn to Shelter Partnership,” Marquez told LAist.
Representatives from Shelter Partnership did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
Slowly, as they were distributed by Shelter Partnership, the toys dwindled from the 600 pallets-worth of toys to the 70 pallets that were accepted by LAUSD in December of last year. The nearly 75,000 toys are valued at nearly $600,0000, according to internal documents from LAUSD that were shared with Insider.
A Los Angeles Unified spokesperson told Insider in an emailed statement that the donated items will be used by schools to “support their student programs.”
“Items are donated to schools until inventory is exhausted,” the spokesperson added, but did not answer questions regarding how the toys would be divided among LAUSD students or whether these types of bulk donations are typical for the district to receive.
It remains unclear whether any of the toys have been distributed to students so far or if they will be stored for undetermined future use.