I’ve heard that some grant money is earmarked to be spent in stupid ways. “Here’s $2M for technology” means they can put a Threadripper on every desk, but not replace the desk, or the 30-year-old textbooks within it.
I’m surprised there aren’t an ecosystem of crooked vendors that know ways to help cashout such grants. Buy these garbage PCs for $1000 each, and we have a “surplus trade in programme” to buy them back for $600 cash each in 3 months, giving you no-longer-restricted cash to actually fix the hole in the cafeteria floor that’s already swallowed Mrs Baxter’s third grade class"
I’m surprised there aren’t an ecosystem of crooked vendors
I bring good and a bad news.
It’s not just in education.
Retail pharmacy. My company ~2 years ago decided to start offering clinical services to patients - great! In my store, they walled off part of what used to be the stockroom, expanding our waiting area and giving us a dedicated vaccination room (previously in a sectioned off part of the waiting room) and a health care room (where all the new services went).
To support these new services we got all kinds of really fancy tech - 20 inch 1440p (?) touchscreens for check-in. Very high end blood pressure machines. Two (2) computers in the healthcare room for the one (1) healthcare provider, because, you never know. These changes can be seen in a majority of this company’s stores.
If you haven’t guessed by now, they’ve decided to not go through with those clinical services. All of the tech we bought (if I had to estimate, very conservatively, $15k USD for my store) is either reboxed or installed but powered off on the sales floor, has been for ~12-18 months, and has no plans of ever being repurposed or sold. The vaccination room serves zero additional purpose to the area we had before, and the “healthcare room” is now used as the pharmacy stockroom (since, y’know, they removed part of the stockroom to build it). This is all ignoring the money spent on actually building these rooms (with lighting and climate control nicer than the rest of the store) and profits lost during construction.
But we don’t have enough money for raises, or enough hours to functionally staff the pharmacy 🙃
If the company wasn’t constantly buying stupid shit like this and spending money on the most inefficient systems ever, I’d be more inclined to agree with you.
Idiotic business decisions are the recurring costs.
Example: We have a new program in place that is supposed to “balance” inventory across locations. My pharmacy has sent and received the same specialty medication back and forth to another location on the other side of the country 3 times now, with neither location having actual need for the medication. I’m sure we’ve got a good corporate deal with FedEx, but there’s expenses outside of shipping costs (namely pharmacy labor hours) that we’re expending to literally just ship a box back and forth across the country. And if we don’t do it, they’ll come harassing us to see what the “issue” is.
A 50 inch flat screen school price is like 150$ one time deal. I’m only just saying…not saying I think teachers pay is fine because its not.
It’s the same logic as “why do homeless people have phones?”. it’s a one time purchase. It’s not going to cover ongoing rent.
But yeah, also a problem.
Not really a good comparison. In modern times, a smart phone is a basic necessity and can be that persons only connection to their friends, family and work opportunities. A digital sign in the lobby of a school doesn’t hold nearly the same utility.
Then a necklace. Whatever.
Poor people are allowed to have nice things occasionally.
My kid’s school has 2" thick ballistic glass covering the office.
But the French teacher doesn’t even know French.
The solution to school shootings is to protect themselves and let the kids fight on their own?
We don’t even need the teachers. Just give each classroom a conch shell and they’ll be fine
Schools everywhere are replacing projectors with tvs because projector bulbs can be upwards of $200 replaced every other year (not counting those absent minded teachers who leave their projector on overnight); and the cost is rising. TV prices, for their lifespan, cost less than replacing bulbs and the price is dropping. Projectors also have double the energy usage and generate heat.
As for teachers only using them as welcome screens, I don’t know. More grant money toward training and resources instead?
My guess is that this is talking about flat screens used in common areas for announcements and whatnot. Not screens in rooms.
