Olympic High Students Get Supplies Thanks to Santa Monica Developer NMS

By Jorge Casuso

August 31, 2012 -- Marcia Gecht, a longtime teacher at Olympic High School in Santa Monica, is often faced with a difficult choice. Does she use the meager funds at the cash-strapped school to buy the students notebooks and pens, or does she buy them food?

"If you have a limited amount of money, you have to decide," said Gecht, who has taught English, government, economics, health and criminal justice at the school for 37 years.

Often, Gecht has opted to use the money for food and dip into her own purse to buy the students the much-needed supplies.

But the choices just got easier for Gecht and other teachers thanks to NMS Properties, one of Santa Monica's major developers, which held a drive at its buildings across the city and collected a large roomful of donated supplies from tenants at many of its 1,000 units.

"We want to help the good causes that happen in the city," said Neil Shekhter, who manages NMS Properties and its affiliates. "We want to help people in need."

The developer made appeals to its tenants in person and via email and placed donation baskets at all of its Santa Monica developments.

The results were displayed Thursday afternoon on tables at the lobby of NMS' Luxe apartments at 9th Street and Broadway and in a small building in front of the complex, where supplies were piled on a row of tables and filled backpacks that hung from the walls.

There were tall stacks of boxes of copy paper, mounds of pencils and pens, calculators, zip drives, stick notes, tape, paper clips, makers, pencils and pens. There was even a computer donated by Staples, Shekhter said.

The supply boon was a godsend for the 45-year-old high school, which as Santa Monica's only alternative continuation school serves some 140 students, many of them poor and at risk of failing at other district schools, school officials said.

"We're limited in resources because we don't have a PTA or booster clubs, and we're small," said Principal Janie Yuguchi Gates, Ed. D. "Forty to fifty percent of our students can't afford school supplies."