Interschola - Company

K-12 schools "retire" a significant amount of property and durable goods each year. Asset reallocation is a large and complex issue for schools and districts nationwide.

These assets may include: classroom furniture and fixtures, instructional materials and supplies, lab equipment, physical education equipment, computers/technology, foodservice equipment and supplies, vehicles (cars, trucks, buses and other heavy machinery), office furniture and equipment, maintenance and custodial equipment, etc.

When such goods are designated as "surplus", a school administrator is charged with disposal of the existing items to make room for new items. Though a good portion of this surplus has not reached the end of its usable life, currently, there are few venues where schools/districts can find sufficient value in the retired goods to make it worth their while to find an alternative for disposal other than expensive warehouse storage or the local landfill.

InterSchola provides a model designed to eliminate the headaches associated with surplus disposal by finding buyers for these valuable assets. On behalf of our Clients, InterSchola manages the auction process from start-to-finish, in compliance with complex legal Education Code that allows education institutions to sell their surplus in a public auction environment. eBay provides an ideal marketplace.

InterSchola™ is the brainchild of Melissa Rich. Melissa began her work in the education field at Intel Capital, where she recommended emerging education companies for investment. Later, she worked as an executive in the educational technology and textbook publishing industries, helping companies forge strong partnerships to service the education industry. Intent on helping the nation’s struggling schools and curious about what schools do with their surplus assets, Melissa turned to some of her former school clients to ask the question – “What do you do with the stuff you no longer need?”

After quickly learning that very few resources existed for schools to realize value from their valuable surplus items, Melissa contacted two former colleagues and set to work to write a business plan for an organization that would help K-12 school districts extract value from their surplus. In the summer of 2003, Melissa pitched InterSchola to executives at eBay, the world’s largest auction marketplace, where her idea had strong support. With a unique business model that leverages the strength of the eBay platform and community, Melissa built a service organization to help schools sell their no longer needed assets to interested buyers on eBay.

In May 2004, InterSchola launched its first pilot auctions with five pioneering school/district clients in the San Francisco/Bay Area. These five clients sold assets that had been accumulating in their warehouses for more than two decades. The eBay marketplace proved the perfect market for the sale of these goods. Each one of these school clients received a large check in the mail from InterSchola. The results of InterSchola’s first auctions were better than anyone could have imagined.

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