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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"

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 🙃

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.

My kid's school has 2" thick ballistic glass covering the office.

But the French teacher doesn't even know French.

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 old School got a glass Tunnel for 20 meters one year after i left, mY current School has so little money we had 3 hours a day, for 2 weeks because one teacher is sick. Nonetheless we still have 1 of these unusable "smartboards" for every 1.5 rooms or so. This is Germany btw

Grant money can only be used for specific things, unfortunately.

Don't forget trump bibles 69$ each

My school back in the day used its funds to teardown the old huge playset and replace it with an even bigger caged football/basketball field. Needless to say, we went out a lot less during lunch hours since.

Yours got used as a sign? I remember big screens being install in one of the back rooms for some alt education program that never actually happened. This was in the 00's, so those screens were not cheap.

The money that's used to pay teachers' salaries doesn't come from the same funding as these TVs would. This isn't really a fair comparison.

There needs to be a community budget.

Also parents get pissed when you take all their money meant for education and you use it to feed other students.

Also upkeep on a $200 TV is far less than paying an administrative assistant to change signs and calendars. Manual labor is expensive. A TV attached to a calendar is not.