During my sophomore year, during a deep point in the American budget crisis, my school purchased and mounted three thin plasma TVs to be mounted in the cafeteria, to display school news. Only school news. A shitty powerpoint slide of useless information. They got changed to cartoon network everyday repeatedly.
Also, this is the year where the school realized they had no money (gasp) for paper, so we were not allowed to print very often.
Last summer, 14 teachers were laid off and half of the bus drivers were replaced with coaches or teachers. Most buses merged 2 routes into 1 so they're almost always overcrowded as fuck and end up having to have 3 to a seat or call in another bus for everyone that couldn't fit on it.
They bought 30 full-sized desktop Macs for Photo class.
The air conditioning doesn't work in my high school. Instead of repairing it (keep in mind it's been broke for at least 20 years) they buy iMacs, iPads, Smart Boards, new projectors, etc.
[URL]http://thepigskindoctors.com/2010/04/texas-high-school-gets-60-million-football-stadium/[/URL]
I'll just leave this here. (our current stadium is fine)
And we just spent 23 million dollars on a new addition to the school which everyone is happy with.
My school bought a 36" LCD tv for the library, the screen says, "welcome to the library, no food or drinks allowed"
THATS ALL IT'S THERE FOR WTF, IT SERVES NO OTHER PURPOSE! /caps
In the meantime, they charge us for printing paper, 10 cents a sheet, or more for colour, WTF??????????
[QUOTE=Angry Pineapple;32833809]Well for one my school runs the AC all the time, I mean it gets so fucking cold. There is no reason to have it running constantly. Wouldn't shutting it off save them some money?[/QUOTE]
Ahaha.
[editline]24th October 2011[/editline]
[QUOTE=bull3tmagn3t;32931954]My school bought a 36" LCD tv for the library, the screen says, "welcome to the library, no food or drinks allowed"[/QUOTE]
Holy shit fuck what bitch?
A lot of the stupid purchases have to do with how money is allocated within the school system according to the law. For example, the teacher's pay fund could be going dry, but they aren't allowed to take money from the building improvements to fix it. Likewise, if the AC doesn't work, they aren't allowed to pull money from the "buy pretty shit so our school looks good" fund to fix it.
My school spent $30k for win7 keys, to bad our system administrators are to dumb to updates their scripts to make it work with win7.
So I'd have to say yes they do indeed spend money needlessly sometimes.
It seems all my local high school cares about is spending every dime it has on football field bull shit. Who fucking cares about football. Especially high school football.
grants can be gotten for supplies but not to increase teacher's salaries or to get expansive new programs
an example of BS: we're getting a much needed new library/computer lab thing at our school. (the library is about 3/4ths the size of a classroom, and the classrooms are pretty small) to go along with this, the librarian is getting a couple thousand dollars to replace old reference books. (i'm talking 20 years old) over half the books were outdated.
meanwhile, last year, the teachers all got
[img]http://salestores.com/stores/images/images_747/ELMO9419.jpg[/img]
that, which is about 650 a pop, and a projector, which was less. half the teachers don't even use the 650$ thing.
and the only 2 people i've ever seen that use it effectively are my language arts teacher, who uses it sorta like one of those old light projector things, and my math teacher, who uses it to go over notes.
by the way, it's a thing that relays what's under the lens to a device that accepts vga input. kinda useless imo but what are you gonna do about it :\
it takes time to make people adapt to new technology
probably when the overhead projectors were the shit all teachers were like "what is this magic I'll just use chalk and blackboard like REAL teachers do"
[QUOTE=rosar0980;32830912]I've noticed that, sometimes, schools needlessly spend assloads of money. They'll buy something that they don't need, and be saying that they don't have enough money for other things. For example, this year my school district bought EVERY teacher MacBooks and iPads, but they had to cut busing to get children who have been identified as gifted (insanely smart) to where a gifted class takes place. By every teacher, I mean EVERY. They got the chorus director this stuff, the gym teacher got this too. They don't have a need for it. So, do you think that schools, in general, spend needless money?[/QUOTE]
Similar thing happened at my high school last year. I looked into it, apparently they are given money that can only be spent in certain fields, or something like that. Which is why my school had to cut down on power usage yet purchased brand new I7 desktops to replace all the old systems. So basically, if you're given money to use on computers, you can use it on them only. Not for bills or anything else.
Lots of schools blow their budgets on sports rather than education, so I'd say 'Yes' to this topic.
3 Years ago they bought... roughly 120 desktop mac computers to update our windows desktops.... half of the Macs now run windows.
itt people don't understand grant money
[QUOTE=Cheesemonkey;32951791]itt people don't understand grant money[/QUOTE]
Grant money can be spent differently, if it's in the same category - €10000 on "computers" can as easily be spent on cost effective desktops running a good Linux distro as it can on iPads. Or, if obsessed with tablets, on Asus Transformers, which are easily the most productive tablets.
My school has smartboards in every classroom, which are seldom used, and the ceiling mounted digital projectors to go with; all computers in both our computer labs have the Adobe Master Collection CS4 installed on them (which I won't complain about) and some computers have the latest version of 3DS Max; they just installed the most fucking redundant electronic signboard out front, and it's not even 20 feet away from the old letter-card one. The school building itself is old, shitty, and requires constant maintenance.
However, my school is funded by the DoD, so I don't know if that benefits us or not.
My old school was completely inefficient in its handling of resources.
The worst example was paper and water cups. Each student was given the equivalent of 2 sheets of paper a week with information for the parent. This information could have easily been sent by Email, text or memory.
In this school year it had 108 students taking out 216 sheets of unneeded paper a week. 40 weeks a year meant 8640 sheets of paper used for absolutely nothing every year. Every one with printed with black ink.
My school spends roughly £15 per Ink cartridge, each doing 500 pages roughly. To cover at least that (Not counting all other printing in the school) you would need 18 cartridges.
With the school spending £4 per 1000 sheets (Bought in bulk) it means that in total the schools spends £306 a year on this uselessness.
What is done with it? Nothing. A waste of paper and ink better used on something else.
[QUOTE=Jetblack357;32949593]Similar thing happened at my high school last year. I looked into it, apparently they are given money that can only be spent in certain fields, or something like that. Which is why my school had to cut down on power usage yet purchased brand new I7 desktops to replace all the old systems. So basically, if you're given money to use on computers, you can use it on them only. Not for bills or anything else.[/QUOTE]
That is what they did with my school too, the head teacher and deputy heads all got fancy glass furniture for their offices and we got these flat screens popping up around the school but our books were often ancient, in classrooms we often still had old tvs with VHS players and tapes that didn't work half the time, and the art rooms had no hot water.
Oh wait here's another one my school has:
Almost every class now has a projector, with VGA, RCA and HDMI connectors
Yet we still use these bloody TV's on wheels with some DVD+VCR combo on the bottom, and these are the kinda TVs where if you turn the volume up (Loud enough for everyone to hear), instead of speech you just hear this muffled, bassy mess like somebody's talking through a blanket.
Their time management sucks too, my CAD class has one room it can use, and when we turn up to the class there's a friendly sign on the door
"Room closed for cable installation, check timetables for room changes"
There was no room change and even the teacher wasn't aware of this happening
And we've got a classic case of "Big expensive shit that only gets used for one thing", only ours isn't a 30 inch TV
It's an enormous projector designed to display an image about 4 meters wide, as well as an enormous automatic projector screen mounted to the ceiling.
Current use: Displaying the lyrics while we sing our College song (Our principal has a hardon for that whole "school spirit" shit, plus it's catholic), I've seen it used maybe twice for anything else, once was during the first time it was used, the second was about 6 months afterwards, for some year level assembly going on.
Something else popped into my head as well, we've recently had these big motorized cable systems attached to the basketball hoops, which can fold up into the ceiling. This replaces the old one which worked fine as a cheap gearbox you stuck a power drill into. But the lovely thing is, after they installed it, nobody had ran any power cables for it, so for about a month, one was retracted while the other one was down, and nobody could change it.
Current times I've seen the new system being used: 0
My school had this whole environmental campaign, which is all good and well. But they decided to buy about 12 large flatscreens that were placed in the hallways. Then they displayed a slideshow of announcements for the day. Which could have easily just been pinned up on the notice board. The most ironic thing was that they displayed a graph of the schools power use for the week, so we could use it scarsily
Why the hell does every school buy macs??
yes, spend less $$$ on new computers every year and [B][U]get us decent food[/U][/B].
[QUOTE=Bora;32972198]Why the hell does every school buy macs??[/QUOTE]
My school doesn't, we use dell/hp computers that run Windows 7 enterprise.
[editline]idk[/editline]
My school seems to needlessly spend money too. Just last year my school district brought an animated school sign, put about three new smart boards in our school library, etc.
They spend all of that money but they can't even provide the students with an ample amont of paper, and they can't update the school computer that are extremely outdated too.
Not to mention the fact that several teachers almost got fired last year, along with several clubs, classes, and extracurricular activities getting cut too. It's ridiculous.
My school recently bought ~50 iPods and 2 iPads.
They used ~20k they won from a lottery off of a Pepsi raffle.
[QUOTE=Hyper Iguana;33000121]My school recently bought ~50 iPods and 2 iPads.
They used ~20k they won from a lottery off of a Pepsi raffle.[/QUOTE]
I can understand ipads, but why would your school buy ipods?
[QUOTE=ccg;33000180]I can understand ipads, but why would your school buy ipods?[/QUOTE]
Not sure.
I walked into my school's music room (It was at the end of 6th hour, and they needed me to help put away the iPods), and a ~25 kids were playing [i]Cut The Rope[/i]...
[QUOTE=General J;32931551]shortly after letting off some of the best teachers I ever had because they were new, fresh out of college, and "too expensive", the school bought a whole new field of expensive, special turf for the football team.
yes, school faculty are morons.[/QUOTE]
That actually happened at my school not too long ago.
At our school they have a laptop in every room so the teachers can use our online roll system. This semester they replaced all of them with new laptops...
It's a huge fucking waste of money because those laptops are only used for checking the roll, occasionally checking the internet or playing a DVD.
Meanwhile at least 1/4 of our current computer equipment needs replacing or fixing.
Also recently they constructed new toilets at our school but they never open them because they're scared of vandalism.
[editline]28th October 2011[/editline]
[QUOTE=Bora;32972198]Why the hell does every school buy macs??[/QUOTE]
Media classes. Our school has a few Mac labs so the Media students can use them for the video editing software and whatever.
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