Houston Independent School District: An Education In-plant Success Story

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Chuck Werninger is a well-known name in in-plant circles as a successful in-plant professional and evangelist for print. We had the opportunity to speak with him on a wide range of topics regarding in-plant operations, how he has been able to drive change within the Houston Independent School District, and on the value of print in general.

Werninger moved to Houston from Little Rock in 2013 after running Printing Services at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for over six years. Prior to that, he worked in various commercial printing operations.

Printing News: Chuck, thanks for talking with us today. You started out in 2013 at Houston Independent School District (HISD) running the print operation; but today, you have much broader responsibilities. Tell us about that.

Chuck Werninger: Today, as Senior Manager of IT Administrative Services, I direct and oversee the records management, document imaging, printing services, graphic design, mailing services, district post office and 1,300 fleet copiers for the Houston Independent School District. We provide outstanding services for the nearly 200,000 students and their families who attend the district's 280 schools and support the 25,000 principals, teachers and support staff in the fourth largest city in America. My current office is about 11 miles away from the print shop, but my happiest times are when I can visit the shop.

PN: Tell us about the configuration of the print shop.

CW: To be honest, it is part museum and part high tech. We have five older duplicators that we still use almost every single day. And we have a four-unit Didde web which is used for high volume, high speed, lower quality printing. With that press, we can do 4/0 or 2/2. The quality is very 1990s, and we have a hard time getting any roll paper that is not 60-lb offset, so that’s mostly what we run on that press. And that’s the work that is less valued and is going online, except for when they legally have to distribute a piece of paper. And we also have a Presstek 52DI.

PN: What about the higher tech side of the business?

CW: That’s the exciting part. We have a Canon i300 sheetfed inkjet press we have had now for seven years. And we have two Printware iJet digital envelope printers. We also have a Canon VarioPrint 6270 Titan, which I think is the finest sheetfed black and white toner printer ever made. And, of course, we have all kinds of finishing gear to support that, including a Duplo slitter/cutter/creaser, mail sortation equipment, inkjet addressing, inserting, metering, etc. We also have wide format, three Canon Colorado 1640s, a Fotoba XY cutter and a Colex cutter.

PN: What types of things are you doing in wide format?

CW: That’s an exciting and high-growth area. We serve 280 schools and 50 business offices. Often we will be called on to produce posters, and they might want two for each building. They might say something about a new gun law or some kind of compliance document. That’s a 600 run which is too big for conventional inkjet but not long enough to justify large format offset. So it’s perfect for our wide format devices. We can do 600 24x36 posters printed on paper and cut to size in about two hours. One Fotoba can handle the output from three Colorados.

PN: So the Colorados are roll-fed. Any thoughts about getting a flatbed for direct-to-rigid?

CW: That’s in the game plan. We currently do a tremendous amount of yard signs, poster boards and things like that. We print on vinyl and affix that to the substrate, and then cut it with the Colex. We are doing lots of contour-cut yard signs that might have the school name and logo, for example, Austin High School, and their Mustang logo is cut out in the shape of the horse. We have known that going direct-to-board is a better way to produce these, but we couldn’t do everything at once. We also believe that direct-to-board printing will be a real growth opportunity for us, especially when we can print and finish ADA-compliant signage in house

PN: How did COVID affect your operation?

CW: COVID actually reversed a kind of sliding trend downward for us, in that we printed a lot of course packs, especially early on when there was mostly remote learning. And for the first time, our kids got full-color learning materials. The quality was great and the price was low. They really loved it.

PN: I know you are a long-time and vocal advocate for learning materials customized to each student – taking materials you have bought, paid for and have access to use, and selecting the parts of those materials most applicable to each student. Have you been able to implement that at HISD?

CW: Still a work in progress. I don’t have a doctorate in education, so not everyone believes me. I think math is the most likely area for this to develop. The math department at most schools seems to really stick with print, and I think it’s because you kind of need to learn math with pen and paper. Personalized, customized print is harder to produce but more meaningful. I think that the printers who get behind high-value print will still be standing a few years from now. And the ones who are committed to high volume, static, throwaway, low-worth print will suffer.

PN: Your district covers quite a large geographic area. How do people submit their print work?

CW: We have EFI’s Mid-Market Suite which includes the MarketDirect storefront and PACE as the MIS. We also use ProcessShipper. We have a catalog of thousands of items in MarketDirect, everything from forms, business cards and stationery to signs and display graphics, plus people can upload their own designs or use our graphic designer to create custom artwork. We also do special things, like student-designed holiday cards that parents and students can order from the storefront in quantities as low as 10. Another example is for the art department. We found that students were paying a lot to have their artwork reproduced on canvas, and we let the art departments know that we can do that for them faster and with much less cost.

PN: You mentioned ProcessShipper. I understand you promise fast delivery, often next day. Talk a little about the shipping process. You must have intra-district mail services.

CW: We do, but not all print projects can easily be distributed via internal mail, and mail is only delivered twice a week to schools, along with custodial and office supplies, etc. And the exact destinations are not always convenient for the recipient. So what we have done is capitalize on the contract the State of Texas has with FedEx. We ship FedEx Ground, and it is typically a next-day delivery right to the school that has requested it, rather than perhaps ending up in the business office or some other centralized location. It’s efficient and very cost effective.

PN: Anything else you would like to highlight?

CW: Report cards and progress reports. These are each sent out every six weeks. Our previous process was that each school was printing their own report cards, not always even on a quality school letterhead, and manually folding, stuffing and affixing the stamp. Very labor intensive. So we now have about 30 of our schools using our shop for this process, and we hope to grow that. We take their data stream out of the report card system and securely print it in one pass with high-quality color branding, and then we use our automated folding, inserting and metering system to get them ready to mail. We also print the school’s full-color logo and return address on the envelopes, where before they were often handwritten, or the return address was applied with a rubber stamp, that kind of thing. It’s much more efficient and probably more secure, so that’s something we want to continue to grow.