Gotta use the budget on something I guess

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"

66

I’m surprised there aren’t an ecosystem of crooked vendors

I bring good and a bad news.

50
- Ed tech has some of the worst fucking products.
  
  14
Most grants I've seen require that you keep the devices for a specific time (5-10 years generally, probably depends on region). Our storage space is full of long outdated tech that we can't toss or use in any realistic capacity.

14

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 🙃

39

The most efficient economic system ever conceived

17
If it makes you feel any better an executive got a bonus for having the great idea and another got a bonus for realizing it was dumb and pulling the plug before more money was spent.

12
One time annuitised vs recurring costs.

3
- 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.
  
  2
Walgreens?

2

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.

35

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.

18
- 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.
  
  9
ITT: People not understanding staffing costs. $150 barely covers the cost of a substitute teacher for one day

(At least it used to, ten years ago my sister was a sub and she'd make a little over a hundred a day doing that, it may or may not still be enough)

12
"flat screen tv" how old is this meme, significantly cheaper than curved screens these days hah

3
If only teachers would accept flat screen TV's as payment.

3
Not in the 00's when I went to high school. It was for some alt education program that never happen, so who knows how much background cost there was that was wasted.

Also, to many poor schools always seem to fine the funds for their after school sports programs

1
I also think some of these purchases are done "because they need to spend money". You can't really spend a lot of money on food in one.

1

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

But the French teacher doesn't even know French.

32

The solution to school shootings is to protect themselves and let the kids fight on their own?

12
- We don't even need the teachers. Just give each classroom a conch shell and they'll be fine
  
  5
- Better then when they made the kids line up, out in the open for the live shooter drills.
  
  3

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?

23

My guess is that this is talking about flat screens used in common areas for announcements and whatnot. Not screens in rooms.

6
- yeah, I keep waiting for our local district to decide to swap out their smartboards. I want one of those but I'm cheap.
  
  1
Also, the finance department going "what do you mean a screen needs a consumable?!"

We're looking at swapping the conference room projector for a screen now. £200 bulb, £600 for a mahoosive TV that's much brighter.

5

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

16

unusable “smartboards”

What's wrong with smartboards?

2
- My guess is they never ran power drops for them, or they never taught teachers how to use them. Happens a lot - "hey we got cool new tech, but the grant is hyper-specific that it has to be spent on new tech, NOT training for that new tech."
  
  3
- theyre not very smart, plus we already have beamers which do the same job
  
  1

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

16

this is the answer unfortunately. "Updating our schools technology to the modern age" sounds a lot better on our governors resume than "gave the dirty kids soap in the bathroom again"
we genuinely haven't had soap in the dispensers in a few of the bathrooms for months :/

6
Exactly. I wanted to say at my last job that was education based and worked in schools but not for the school district directly. My supervisors and the district would ask if there was anything the team needed. I would always lead with raises and incentives for the clients but they would straight up tell me that they can only get me things that would fall under technology and electronic aid equipment and to try to think of anything that could qualify. They gave me a laptop that I didn’t want and never used, the office did get a ps4 and Xbox one for the kids to play(I beat so many at risk teens at UFC) but we were able to get better mileage reimbursement from .50 to .65

4

Don't forget trump bibles 69$ each

8

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.

6

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.

3

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.

2

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.

-4

You act like thats easy for these people. They need to pay someone to make it work.

2
- No, they pay the IT guy once to set up a calendar and maybe troubleshoot once in a while. It's a calendar, not maintaining InTune and shit.
  
  It's very clear in this thread that most of you have not done any project planning or managed technology.
  
  1