What did your School WASTE MONEY on that Nobody liked? - Reddit Podcast

what did your school waste money on that nobody liked they made a huge screen with four plasma screens and put it in a very random place in a random building Hall all four just constantly said no signal and nothing else name tanks shortly after Columbine and all those other shootings peaked in frequency it was supposed to keep Outsiders from getting in the school unnoticed and shooting everyone but at the time people doing the shootings were always students so we joked that they were bulletproof this does sound like one of those decisions that was made in

response to something happening in current events and maybe wasn't exactly thought through all the way some of my classmates won a bunch of money for our school our school was one of the lowest funded schools in the district the district took the money and spent it on another school maybe that school needed it more or needed it for something really important but yeah either way that doesn't seem fair on surface level the large schoolyard in my school had a set of plant in the center there were basically four triangles made of brick that pointed in

at each other and created an x-shaped walkway between the outside signs had a bench each attached people would sit and chat to each other on the benches teachers and students alike there was very little litter or vandalism the plants were kind of Pretty in so far as any secondary schooler would care to notice one year a duck made her nest in one of the Planters and apart from a few oh hey a duck nest comments it was left alone then for some reason the school decided to rip the planners out took them two-thirds of the

school year to do it and blocked off the X walkways so everyone had to Crush by on the outside Lanes between classes everyone was super curious as to what the planers would be replaced by turns out nothing they simply bricked over the holes left by the planers and left it as a huge empty space we didn't even get new benches so no one had anywhere to sit during break people started to miss the plant since the lack of color left the whole area kind of bland we also kept to the old X walkway since stepping

over the former plants felt weirder this seems like one of those times where it's just like why what was the issue he spent a lot of time and money to just take something away that was nice iPads for the kindergarten they were intended to have educational apps on them that kids could play on at indoor recess believe it or not most kindergartners would rather play on the swings or play with dolls than learn to write their name on an app no one used them no one liked them and they all broke within two months yeah

that sounds like a waste of money if I ever heard one I was on a boy's Varsity soccer team in high school the new head coach wanted to emphasize a more analytical approach and as such had booster club buy a 10 000 goal post camera none of the team liked the idea anyway especially since the girls soccer team used their money for new jerseys and nicer balls and they still made it farther in their playoffs than we did almost every year as it turns out the coach couldn't figure out how to put the camera together

and we never used it biggest waste of ten thousand dollars I've ever seen I'm sure there was a much cheaper option he probably could have gone for trash cans with the School logo on them and Banners they tried hyping us up about new trash cans on the morning show at my school they took away some of the tables in the cafeteria until we kept it cleaner we just sat on the floor instead when 65-inch TVs were like 4K a pop they said about eight of them around campus that just displayed the time four thousand dollar

clocks not to mention whatever they used as a video source to send to the display this makes no sense to me that you would make an investment like this and then not make proper use of it what is wrong with people you can do so much more than just show the time be creative come on my high school purchased a vending machine that only contained swerve what is swerve you ask carbonated milk again who's in charge of these ideas a 3D printer that the teachers won't learn how to use so now nobody's allowed to use

it my school got four of those and the teacher responsible for them actually encouraged us to take the SolidWorks course to learn about 3D design it was actually a lot of fun and I still have some of the objects I created goes to show a lot of the times it comes down to the person doing the teaching they have to have some enthusiasm a memorial tree was planted for a girl who was killed right before graduation by her family and friends the school allowed it and there was a beautiful Japanese maple tree there for like

10 years apparently they just cut it down and had no reason why everyone was pretty ticked off especially the family my son's current School sent out an email to parents announcing that they like to add voice projection to every class he's in first grade and there are 20 kids in his class totally unnecessary they had a demo session and it sounded horrible my high school teacher got these Midway through my junior year and they sucked the range wasn't great and the receiver in one classroom would pick up the microphone in another and the battery life

was awful so the teachers rarely used it the best thing that they were used for was the one time that my teacher noticed a kid in the room across the hall was a sleeping class they were watching a video and the other teacher had stepped out of the room for a moment they walked over to the door so that the other room's receiver would pick up his mic and said wake up and then closed his door this really does sound like a waste of money unless you specifically have a kid who has a hearing disability

or something and in that case normally they have something that is individual to them that connects to their hearing aid and the teacher has a microphone so that they can hear them better not something that needs to be projected to the whole class when I was still a student my school spent almost two hundred thousand dollars to paint the road outside our school you read that right almost 200 000 of our precious tuition dollars to paint the roads outside blue and yellow to pour salt on this painful wound the paint job didn't even make it

through winter just to reiterate two hundred thousand dollars for three months of painted Road I think I'm still angry about it who would hear that cost and decide yeah that sounds like a good investment my high school wasted a ton of money buying two golf carts their reasoning was it allowed staff to get to any dangerous scenes faster except we never had any accidents and they were mostly used for Joyrides by the hall monitors you know what this one I can kind of get behind it's not some two hundred thousand dollar expense and they got

used and yet a little fun along the way one of the schools in art district paid an astronomical fee to an artist to create great artwork for the Hall of the school paid for the dude's room and board for like a year and he produced a large polished piece of wood no literally that's it it was supposed to be shaped like a heart but looks more like a butt and is now known as the BART I'm sorry but sometimes I do think that Modern Art is just ridiculous and a rip-off my school just spent tens

of millions of dollars on a remodel that includes a new Commons and front office area which were not needed but no new classrooms which were desperately needed the old comments was warm inviting bright and beautiful it wasn't old the new Commons is dark cold sterile and uninviting the exterior was changed too the entire front of the school used to be attractive now it looks like a prison I think maybe the architect presented the design as a joke but our principal liked it so the architect just rolled with it it never fails that when a school

gets some money they spend it on the staff and not the students they cut out welding machine shop wood shop and graphic design to buy a one million dollar scoreboard for football honestly there's way too much value put onto Sports everything that was listed sounds way more valuable to learn than to be able to look at a scoreboard our mascot was a rocket and a certain percentage of school construction money had to be spent on Art they spent ninety thousand dollars commissioning a giant rocket sculpture for the main field entrance when it was unveiled the

artist had made one tiny change to the design instead of a pointy rocket tip he'd gone with a rounded um mushroom tip I mean we thought it was hilarious especially when they cut off the tip as their solution to the problem but nobody liked it I'm sorry did they circumcise the rocket my school invested an eight-year-old Chromebooks that die in like 30 minutes again not willing to invest in what the students actually need and just go going for the cheapest crappiest thing they can find I'm a teacher my first year the school leader bought a

ping pong table for the lounge in an attempt to make the school more fun and relaxing it simply became a surface to put copies on you know what this one sounds like it's more of a people around you situation you guys could be having fun with it but you're choosing not to that's on you not them besides tables themselves can get pretty expensive at least this one you can play with if you want my son's elementary school PTO had an excess of funds they decided to put it on a buddy bench a buddy bench is

a bench where you can sit on if you want a buddy in theory it sounded like a decent idea except that it was placed in the hallway near the office and none of the kids wanted to be identified as someone who didn't have a friend nobody ever sits on it I agree that the theory of the Buddy bench is nice but in practicality it's probably not gonna get used this wasn't common knowledge so Ein was the only one really ticked off buy it but I worked for Cisco foods as a baker at a university and

the upper echelons of the administration and hired their own personal pastry chef to make these extravagant desserts for their meetings this pastry chef was legit she made absolutely amazing desserts of a wide variety every day loaded them onto the cart and with her Baker's outfit and hat on would wheel it up to their daily Administration meetings her salary was paid for by the students at the school so that the administrators could dine on first-class pastries and desserts made from scratch each day she was really good at her job and actually helped me improve in the

bakery but I was so mad that her job even existed simply to provide pastries to people who just sat around and decided how the school's money was spent I obviously didn't make a stink about it to anyone because she was my friend and I would never dream of putting her employment at risk but I couldn't help feeling like her entire career was to make fat cats fatter and it just boiled my blood okay this is the first story that has genuinely he ticked me off and how money is being spent just random TVs in the

hallway that showed slide shows and crap tens of thousands of dollars when we could have just put up bulletin boards my school had loads of TVs that I don't recall ever seeing turned on seems like there might be a trend in the TV area here the installed cameras in nearly every inch of the school not for student safety but because the school board didn't trust the kids my school was miles behind other high schools old textbooks and sometimes not enough textbooks computers were junk no in-school programs they spent every ounce of money on cameras and

putting the rest into school board's Pockets I really feel like these places need to be more strongly audited for stuff like this my high school spent a bunch of money on this system to play popular songs for the last minute of passing time between classes so we'd hear popular music and as a convenient way to know to get to your next class then they started playing Friday by Rebecca Black every Friday once then it was the only song on Fridays then it was the only song every day five times a day thank God that was

my senior year no idea if they still do it my God I hope not I'm sure the kids would be rioting my school's mascot was a night and it was rumored that the school had the choice of installing a pool at the high school or to commission a large 25 foot long metal sculpture of a night on a horse and to hang it from the ceiling in the back hallway they opted for the horse my guess on this one is they didn't want the long-term maintenance cost of the pool they bought flags of all the

states and put them around this caged in area full of gravel they caged in the gravel to stop students from walking across the gravel they also bought Flags in the school's color to line the fence around campus only thing is we were in an area which can get very windy with zero windshield so those flags took a beating by mid-year they were an ugly ugly frayed my school spent thirty thousand dollars from two years of fundraising on an LED billboard about 10 feet off of a major road it was so bright that it caused several

accidents at night and had to be shut down about eight months later because it was deemed a safety hazard I hung out with several of the guys on the programming team and they figured out how to upload memes onto it they couldn't figure out who did it so no one got in trouble in 2011 my college spent 32 thousand dollars to have Snooki come in as an inspirational speaker in some misguided attempt to connect with freshmen around the same time there was a growing student-led movement to make the school more affordable the student board revolted

people confronted her during her speech it was a glorious mess I think anyone who finds Snooki to be inspirational doesn't need to be encouraged I went to a Catholic High School very few of the students were actually Catholic and went there because the local public school district was terrible we won some contest or Grant and the school said they would allow the students to pick what the money was spent on the options were new flooring for the gym renovate the courtyard next to the chapel into a prayer Garden or renovating the courtyard next to the

cafeteria into an outdoor eating space most people voted for new gym floors and some people voted for the outdoor eating space I don't know of anyone who voted for the prayer Garden guess what one the prayer Garden people even teachers were Furious as the voting was clearly rigged to give us the appearance of a choice if they really wanted a prayer Garden they should have just done the work without putting it to a vote the funny thing about the prayer Garden is that they actually made it nice and put in benches and plants and whatnot

but it was always locked and never used administered situation would often say during tours oh look at our lovely prayer Garden for students they voted for it no no we didn't wait the church used the money on themselves no i7 workstation laptops with Quadro gpus easily 2500 each for an elementary school kindergarten through grade six those machines were designed for CAD work and media production but were instead solely used for web browsing and Microsoft Word I don't have any idea why they bought them okay so earlier we were talking about eight-year-old Chromebooks this school has

decided to go to the complete opposite into the Spectrum these are laptops that should be available to University students who are studying like 3D rendering and things like that this really goes to show that the people who designed where the money goes don't have any idea what they're doing laminated ID cards that everyone had to wear around their necks on some dorky lanyard no no one did it so they made it punishable by detention after that half the students still didn't do it and the detention Hall became so overwhelmed that they began to make backlogs

after a few weeks not wearing it gave you a detention two months from then eventually detention became so backlogged that students started doing more severe transgressions because they would have graduated before they could actually be forced to go to detention after about a month of this no one had to wear their ID cards at all anymore they said it was for security purposes so no one could sneak into the school the thing is you could literally put anything in the lanyard and no one would check if it was your actual student ID card I had

a blank index card in mine and no one ever said anything to me if someone actually wanted to sneak into the school all they would need is a lanyard and no one would ever check if it's actually authentic or not like what's the point you're gonna sit there and enforce detention that aggressively because you need to flex your power over the students but you're not not going to enforce the actual safety aspect that you're trying to argue that it's there for in the first place guys this thread's really getting to me our school paid to

cover a huge lot with cement just to have a ceremony on it announcing a new building then they tore it up two months later to start construction my school fees went towards having nice cement for press pictures what a joke my school wasted so much money on plastic ID cards that you were supposed to scan into every room to assure you were there and the IDS were also keys to get into the buildings if you didn't have your card you couldn't get in and also got in school suspension it wasn't a bad system because you

could easily take a photo of your ID to scan into rooms but you'd have to bum a buddy to get into a building but once there were internet problems the whole system would shut down and living in a rural wheat town you could expect wind and rain and tornadoes and all of that fun stuff my college spent two thousand dollars on a conference table it made national headlines this just reminds me of that scene from Community when I went to college the local NFL team paid for the school to go from a grass field to

artificial turf the school never said it was only half paid for by the team my siblings had a whole year without paper printers no raises for staffs cutting school programs and they slashed the art budget the football team still got new uniforms that year though how are you gonna put so much value on your football team come on give the rest of the students what they need my town got a brand new middle school and somehow they spent forty thousand dollars on a giant metal palm tree that they called The Learning Tree one of the

chair people essentially commissioned it from a relative so many of us were ticked off it didn't even have lights and there was no way to clean it so it just sat there like the Giant waste of money it was collecting dust well we liked it at first not so much after I followed a product development study and we got a fancy industry grade laser cutter in our workplace then after a couple of people were able to use it the teacher decided it needed cleaning she proceeded to use a toothpick to shove it into the nozzle

where the laser comes out damaging the mirror inside the machine we had this thing for less than a week two years later I graduated and as far as I know that thing is still broken those lasers are incredibly expensive and Powerful what do you think was stuck in there that you could get out with a toothpick that the laser couldn't get out itself when I started secondary school we had a canteen with proper home style food being served cooked fresh real meat and vegetables and good portion sizes all the students loved it and it was

well used the school decided to replace this with a fast food style setup with processed Burgers and Fries to try to appeal to the kids and up the prices too within a month nobody visited the canteen anymore practically every kid in the school started bringing food from home it took three months till they changed everything back again Mass of expense for absolutely no reason it was already very successful as it was why mess with a good thing you just wanted to get cheaper food in there and charge more didn't you when you subscribe make sure

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