McGarnagle
Yes.
- Aug 5, 2017
- 28,968
- 38,795
My town literally just spent $200 mil on a new high school that nobody can use now. Hopefully this pandemic will force other towns to adapt and not make the same mistakes all these other towns are making. High schools don't need to compete with ivy league college facilities.
The towns can cry poor all they want but real education spending has gone up by 300% since 1960 ("real spending" accounts for inflation). They don't need endless amounts of money. They need to start spending it more wisely.
I agree. The bloat in the public education budgets is real estate and facilities, and an increase of school budgets won't go to the actual education happening inside the classroom. It's really a government shell game where the construction companies and real estate people lobby the state legislatures to put in all these regulations for building codes and shit, then they send in the inspectors to write up a list of what work needs to be done to get up to code, which gets outsourced to the contractors, and eventually they talk the town into building a new school altogether that is in the hundreds of millions range. I'm not so anti-regulation that I want kids packed like sardines in asbestos-filled rooms, but there has to be a realistic option. The kids don't need a palace to do crappy algebra in.
My hometown back in NH had a major spat a decade or so ago because the high school that I went to was built in like 1911 and was functional but showed its age.The PTA and the district kept advocating for a new school, which they put on the ballot every year, and always got voted down by the older people in town because they didn't want the property tax hike. Eventually there was a situation where the result of one initiative approved the town to buy a plot of land for a school, while the initiative to actually build the school was voted down. So the town just owns this empty plot of land across the street. Incredibly wasteful.