Teacher DIY: Re-purposing old white boards

Visual art is not my strong suit, but I still tried to take one a couple DIY projects for school this summer. Right now, I'm working on re-purposing some old student white boards in very rough shape. The white boards from my classroom are at least 12 years old, and I was lucky enough to be able to buy new ones with budget money last year. I could have just tossed the old ones, but since I don't have clipboards, I have used them as a hard surface for kids to use under their paper when doing written work. My students often do written work when there's a substitute, and telling the substitute to have students get white boards led to a lot of confusion, so I decided to take away the white board surfaces and call them "clipboards" to make everyone's life a little easier.

Knowing that these boards would get quite a bit of use, and that my students don't always stay on the paper when coloring, I decided that basic black would be the best color for durability and aesthetic purposes. I grabbed some glossy spray paint from Home Depot, making sure it said that it could be used on plastic.

Now here's one of those times this teacher didn't do what she always tells the students to do: I didn't follow the directions. The directions said to sand glossy surfaces, and I read them, but ain't nobody got time for that. I decided to try out just spraying them and seeing what happened. It still worked! They aren't perfect, but the boards look a lot better than they did and not sanding saved me a lot of time.

I put down newspaper in the garage, laid out the boards, and started spraying away! Here's some "before" pictures:

And "after":

They're not "Pinterest perfect" but they will help my students by giving them a durable hard surface to serve the purpose of a clipboard (without the annoying clips that pinch fingers and break) without costing a lot of money.