Monday, September 2, 2019

Cost of education

I am sitting here bored while waiting for the arrival of Hurricane Dorian. I still have the 12 hour checklist portion of my preparations to do, but they are on hold because the nearest tropical storm level winds are 135 miles from here and the storm is still stationary.

With that in mind, I am sitting here reading the proposed budget for my school district. The budget calls for $548 million in expenditures. There are a total of 43,000 students in the district. This works out to a cost of $12,700 for each student. Seems pretty high to me.


1 comment:

zuk said...

A close reading of our district plan revealed that we are allowing the building of cell phone towers on school property. We will receive below market rent for the towers, but we will have access to the top 15 feet.

Why?

Because our district has decided to go into the ISP business, providing free internet access to our "underserved" populations near our schools. No estimate of what that will cost or who will provide the gear, antennas, account management, bandwidth, and tech support... but I'm betting it will be the taxpayers in our school district.

Oh, and our latest 'tech refresh' got 80inch flat screen tvs to replace the Promethian boards that were perfectly fine with projectors. (smartboards- electronic whiteboards for those who may not know.) They're $4000 each. I'm not sure how many we got. And some campuses got a chromebook for every student to break, steal, or lose with no consequences.

I'm confident there are similar things in your budget.

zuk

(or throwing out library books, while there is still empty shelf space in the library... that's a nice one too.)