Preparing for Chinese toys this coming holiday season.

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A couple of weeks before Easter, some well-meaning donors pulled up with a van full of toys to one of the St. Vincent de Paul thrift shops in Pensacola, Fla.

Although she carries some toys that move well before the holiday, particularly stuffed animals, Manager Mary Anne Beovich looked over the offering and politely turned it down. "It just wasn't worth it for us," she said later. "We didn't have the people to sort through all that to figure out what we could sell and what we couldn't"

But a few hours' drive away, the story is much different. "We check out everything we receive to see if it has been recalled," said Sharon Jackson, president of the Christmas Toy Shop Project in St. Petersburg, Fla. "Other than that, it's business as usual".

For years, nonprofit thrift shops and toy drives have dealt with recalls as a standard part of operations, much like their for-profit cousins. But rarely have they run up against anything as broad in scope as the spate of toy recalls in 2007.

The Consumer Products Safety Commission counted 39 recalls last year covering just the 5.6 million Chinese-made toys that were coated with paint containing excessive levels of lead. If eaten or swallowed by a child, they could have caused lead poisoning.

By contrast, the commission counted only 40 recalls for all toys during its fiscal year 2006 ended Sept. 30. There were a total 61 toy recalls for 2007.

While the first lead paint recall took place in March, covering nearly 129,000 "Elite Operations" combat sets sold by retailer Toys "R" Us, the magnitude of the problem did not burst into public prominence until several much larger recalls by major manufacturers Mattel and Fisher-Price started during August. Before the onslaught abated, toys as disparate as battery-powered robots and frog-shaped board game pieces had been declared unsafe, although generally in batches of a few thousand each and as small as 60.

The responses of nonprofit thrift shop and Christmas toy drive managers diverged widely, and no consensus has emerged regarding how they will handle toys this holiday season. Some, such as Beovich, have decided to tightly restrict the types of toys they will stock or forget about them completely rather than risk putting something potentially dangerous in a customer's hands. Others are looking to return to their pre-recall position or are already there. Likewise, the sophistication the managers use to determine what to keep and what to toss covers a wide range.

Adele Meyer, executive director of the National Associations of Resale & Thrift Shops in St. Clair Shores, Mich., estimates that 10-15 percent of the more than 1,000 members carry toys. But she has not conducted any surveys on how they dealt with recalls.

Even national organizations, such as Goodwill Indus tries, the Salvation Army and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul that grant their stores substantial operating autonomy, cannot readily say who did what. Beovich, for example, said she does not know how the other two St. Vincent de Paul stores in Pensacola are dealing with toys.

Moreover, the problem does not vanish even if recalls do not resurface as an issue. People might pull toys out of their closets and donate them, not realizing or remembering that they were tagged as defective. "The challenge is keeping this at the top of the mind," said Christine Nyirjesy Bragale, a national spokesperson for Goodwill industries in Rockville, Md. "We know this will always be a challenge, but not a huge hurdle. It is one we think we can manage."

To a large degree, strategy is guided by how many people work at a store and how much toys contribute to sales. Toys have never been a big seller at the Pensacola store, so Beovich adopted a simple rule to reduce the time spent complying with recalls: if it is painted and made in China, it's out.

"Around Christmas time, that meant we disposed of some Thomas the Tank trains and some beautiful Barbie dolls," she said. "It was kind of sad, but it is something we had to do."

Beovich's situation highlights the dilemma facing nonprofits: whether to keep popular toys on the shelves by committing the extra effort and people needed to find the sometimes subtle differences that separate safe from recalled toys, or to get rid of them because the effort is too complex and costly.

The Barbie recall by Mattel covered 675,000 items split among seven different accessories, each with its own date codes, sold over a span of 10 months. Identical accessories that came off the assembly line at different times are still considered safe.

RC2 Corp. recalled 27 different wooden train cars in its "Thomas & Friends" series, for a total 1.7 million units, but that still left many Thomas models that could be sold.

Goodwill Industries of Denver, which has 16 stores, moved all its plastic toys to storage but kept selling stuffed animals, said Vice President of Operations Ric Berninzoni. "The recalls were so vast, we just didn't have the people to deal with them," he said. "So we decided to pull them all off the shelves and sort through them later."

But it is an open question when they will start going through the toys, currently stacked on about a half dozen palettes in a warehouse. In addition, he has no plans to start selling plastic toys again.

"Toys are not a big category for us" said Berninzoni. "For us to go through and check for what was recalled is virtually impossible."

But across the Pacific Ocean, Goodwill Industries of Hawaii is laying the groundwork to return to toy sales that were halted in August. The organization has been studying how to modify procedures at its eight stores, said Vice President of Corporate Services Laura Kay Rand, with the hope of reintroducing toys by mid-year.

Blue Mountain Thrift in Annville, Pa., has settled on a system of screening by size. They still carry larger toys, like trucks children can ride, but have eliminated the rest, cutting the toy section to about one-third of its former size, said Office Manager Kim Keeney. This followed a process established by the store manager of screening donations and taking out those that were questionable rather than burn a lot of time looking up date stamps or model numbers.

Others, however, will continue mostly as before. "Probably the best thing that happened to us was that most of our toys are donated between Thanksgiving and Christmas" said William Grein, vice president of marketing and development for the Toys for Tots Foundation in Quantico, Va. "A good portion of the recalled toys had already been identified and taken off the shelves by then."

Still, he said, Toys for Tots put unspecified "extra resources" into screening last year to ensure that recalled toys did not slip through the system. In the Atlanta region, that effort rooted out nearly 400 toys out of more than 300,000 examined, he said.

Because Toys for Tots has always checked for safety and for whether particular items were right for certain age groups, Grein anticipated no need to change the approach for the coming year.

While puzzles and games sell well for ARC of Butte County in Chico, Calif., toys have not been a major item, said Brenda Easter, who manages the group's three stores in central California. After going through what she termed a start over last year, where all the toys were checked, the ARC has resumed selling "newer-looking toys and we leave it up to the parents to decide whether or not to buy them" she said. "If there was a specific recall, then we complied. But otherwise, we have no way of knowing what has lead in it."

The Salvation Army deals with toys on two fronts: through its Christmas season Angel Tree program, distributing gifts to children under 12, and its network of thrift stores.

Corporate sponsors donate many of the Angel Tree toys, so many of problems were weeded out before they reached the Salvation Army, said Spokeswoman Melissa Temme. "The retail industry was our first line of defense," she said.

After that, the Salvation Army checked the toys again, a system that will remain in place this year.

The individual thrift shops, which are not operated by the central office, retained the option of which, if any, toys to carry. But those that kept toys were required to screen them against recall lists and pull any that were red flagged.

A template developed in Dallas, she said, was picked up in several other regional. There, the management developed master recall lists with pictures next to the descriptions to make recalled toys easier to fred. In addition, the lists were handed to customers as an additional safety step.

Still, she said, "It was an exceptional challenge for the thrift stores, particularly coming at that time of year."