Jun 22
2026
What Schools Learn When They Finally See Their Printing Data
School administrators rarely walk into a building thinking printing will become an operational priority. Yet in many K-12 environments, unmanaged printing quietly drains budgets, creates workflow bottlenecks, wastes instructional time, and generates unnecessary waste.
So many school leaders don’t know how printing is happening across their campuses. They know paper and toner costs are high; that teachers are frustrated when devices jam or queues back up; that stacks of abandoned pages appear near copiers, but without visibility into usage patterns, school administrators are left guessing where the real inefficiencies exist.
That changed for Sela Public Charter School in Washington, D.C.
The PreK3–5 Hebrew immersion charter school serves roughly 277 students and operates with the same resource pressures many schools face today: balancing budgets, supporting teachers, and improving sustainability without creating additional administrative pressures.
According to Ryan Benjamin, Senior Director of Operations, Finance, and Development, printing had gradually become one of those operational headaches that everyone noticed, but nobody could fully measure.
“We would come in and see stacks of paper left behind at the copier,” Ryan said. “Sometimes hundreds of sheets in a week. People were printing things they no longer needed, and there was no visibility into who printed what.”
School printing had evolved into an unrestricted environment. Staff printed unlimited pages in color or black-and-white without realizing the financial impact. Teachers waited in line at shared devices during busy morning periods, creating frustration and wasted time before classes even began.
Sela’s leadership initially wasn’t looking to overhaul printing workflows. Its first goal was gaining visibility into who was printing what and how much.
Many assume improved print management means rigid restrictions or additional work for teachers and staff, but in practice, greater visibility into behavior can change user behavior. Once administrators can identify usage patterns, abandoned jobs, and resource-heavy workflows, they can begin implementing practical guardrails without disrupting instruction.
At Sela, administrators introduced print tracking and secure release workflows over the summer break to avoid interrupting the school year. Staff continued printing as usual, but print jobs remained in a secure queue until released at the printer. Teachers and staff could retrieve jobs from any shared copier rather than being tied to a single machine.
The operational impact was immediate.
Within just a few months, the school reduced print output by 17%, directly saving on materials and lowering waste.
Equally important, staff workflows improved.
Ryan says one of the most noticeable changes was the disappearance of copier lines.
“There used to be a line at the copier in the morning,” he said. “Now, teachers can print when it’s convenient for them. They can send a job from home, walk by later, and release it at whichever device is available.”
Eliminating unnecessary waiting and reducing abandoned print jobs creates efficiencies that go beyond paper savings alone.
The school also discovered that small workflow improvements can significantly improve the user experience. For example, staff scanning processes became simpler because authentication automatically recognized users and routed scanned documents directly to their email accounts. Employees no longer needed to navigate complicated address-book menus or repeated verification steps at the copier.
Importantly, the transition called for very little behavioral retraining.
Teachers still printed the materials they needed for instruction. The difference was that printing became intentional instead of invisible.
This is where many schools can benefit from reframing the conversation around print management. The objective is not to prevent educators from printing instructional materials. In many classrooms, printed content continues to be essential. The real goal is to eliminate unnecessary waste, lessen operational friction, and provide administrators with meaningful data about resource usage.
Education leaders frequently talk about using data to drive instruction. Operational systems should be approached the same way.
When schools can see where resources are being consumed, they can make smarter decisions about budgeting, sustainability initiatives, and workflow improvements. In many cases, even modest changes in visibility and accountability can produce measurable reductions in waste without negatively affecting classroom instruction.
For schools facing tighter budgets and increasing pressure to operate efficiently, printing may seem like a small issue compared to larger technology priorities. But operational weaknesses often accumulate quietly over time.
Sometimes, solving those challenges starts with something as simple as finally seeing the data.
In today’s education environment, IT leaders juggle a complex set of priorities: securing infrastructure, supporting teachers and students, and finding efficiencies in every corner of operations. But one backend system that often flies under the radar — printing — can become surprisingly costly and chaotic when left unmanaged.