Los Angeles Unveils $578 Million Public School 367
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from an Associated Press report on next month's opening of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles:
"With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation's most expensive public school ever. The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of 'Taj Mahal' schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities. ... At RFK, the features include fine art murals and a marble memorial depicting the complex's namesake, a manicured public park, and a state-of-the-art swimming pool. 'There's no more of the old, windowless cinderblock schools of the '70s where kids felt, "Oh, back to jail,"' said Joe Agron, editor-in-chief of American School & University, a school construction journal. 'Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning.' ... Critics note that nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, the academic year and programs have been slashed, the district faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation's lowest performing."
Does It Have (Score:2, Funny)
a mosque [nytimes.com]?
Thanks in advance.
Yours In Astrakhan,
K. Trout
Re:Does It Have (Score:5, Insightful)
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...or an earthquake will turn their precious fine art murals and marble memorial into nostalgia....
You're buying a little too heavily into a Los Angeles stereotype, there. Unless you believe we don't have any Art museums here. ;)
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You're buying a little too heavily into a Los Angeles stereotype, there. Unless you believe we don't have any Art museums here. ;)
Having grown up in Southern California I know that any vertical surface in a school is a magnet for graffiti. The earthquakes, well, if this new school was built with the same quality control as the schools I attended someone slamming a door may be enough to trigger the first domino.
Any *real* museum (in California or anywhere else) builds the facility with protecting the art in mind. Schools? Not so much.
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Hey big spender! (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that California's budget concerns go far beyond just the building of this school, but this is still the kind of irresponsible spending that got them into the mess they're currently in. If I were in charge of this project, I wouldn't want anyone to know about it right now.
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Re:Hey big spender! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just another example of a society that cannot seperate form from function.
It's like saying, "I do not know how to make a decent school, so I will make a really impressive building, which will suffice as a school"
It makes want to retch. My parents were teachers (retired) and they stay in touch with many teachers who came from their students (from my generation) who they had inspired to teach themselves.
It is reprehensible for a school board (ANY school board) to spend so much damned money on a building when the REAL key to eduction (teachers, DUH!) are underpaid, undersupplied (way too many have to buy materials out of their own pockets) and set in front of huge classes (most of my daughter's classes have 40 students in them this year) only to be judged by standardized tests.
What happened to inspiring students? What happened to drawing their experiences out of them so that they can relate to the lessons and apply them to their lifes? What happened to all the desire to reach a kid and help them realize how they fit into society instead of falling out? Sure it makes a great movie (when the teachers have proven it to work), but the school boards won't fund better teacher salaries!
Oh yeah, a big expensive building is going to fix it.
TOTAL BS!
Scale of LAUSD schools (Score:5, Informative)
Most people don't know that the LAUSD has been building schools at a completely insane pace. For the 15 years from 1997-2012, there has been an average of one new school opened every month! Sure, schools were neglected in the past, but there are tons of brand-new public schools in LA now.
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There are more teachers than teaching jobs, this clearly indicates they are not underpaid.
Re:Hey big spender! (Score:5, Insightful)
or there aren't enough teaching jobs, tbh once the ratio's get down to 1:5 teachers to students, then we can start worrying about if the number of jobs is right. You forget this isn't a normal job market, or revenue system and you must not have kids.
Re:Hey big spender! (Score:5, Insightful)
Or that in spite of obvious need, too many teachers have been laid off to make budget for massive buildings.
Or perhaps even that markets apply to employment much better in theory than in practice.
No (Score:4, Insightful)
No there are more teachers than jobs because teachers are getting laid off all over the nation because their unions don't have the pull to counter all the PORK spending that is not cut and continues to be added to budgets by more influential forces.
Plenty of jobs are underpaid yet they find workers who either want the job OR just NEED work. Some jobs are so low that Americans do not want them so then illegals take them; not because the job is so horrible but because the pay is too low for the work. Do we want teachers paid so bad that nobody wants to become a teacher BECAUSE the pay is so low.... then hire illegals to do the work? There are already good teachers who are doing other jobs because it takes a lifetime to make a good wage as a teacher.
Re:Hey big spender! (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe that underlying your comment is an assumption that public school employment is decided by a vibrant functioning marketplace. That assumption would be incorrect.
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Re:Hey big spender! (Score:5, Informative)
They needed a new school, and it had to deal with a number of special issues. For example,
It is not like this an investment property that they could keep putting off. So the costs of the materials, who knew how high it was going to go? It is not like they could have predicted it was going to go way back down. Also this is Los Angeles,
Construction costs at LA Unified are the second-highest in the nation -- something the district blames on skyrocketing material and land prices, rigorous seismic codes and unionized labor
It is not like they could build it anywhere they want. At the very least, it was an investment in our youth which is better than the proposed "Bridge to Nowhere" (price tag of $398 million).
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Well, that's a good explanation and all, but there's the little problem that this isn't some basic, utilitarian school that cost a lot of money simply because of raw material costs. From the same article you quoted:
At RFK, the features include fine art murals and a marble memorial depicting the complex's namesake, a manicured public park, a state-of-the-art swimming pool and preservation of pieces of the original hotel.
Oh, and in reference to another LA school that cost "only" $377 million:
Over 20 years, t
Re:Hey big spender! (Score:5, Insightful)
California doesn't, except for a few old white folks (who will soon pass on) object to illegal immigration. For most Californians, the Reconquista cannot come soon enough.
Now that's a ton of bullshit. Just about everyone I know here in Cali is an immigrant, and they uniformly have a problem with illegal immigration. The legal immigration path is hard work (needlessly complicated and expensive IMO), and those who have done it don't exactly like those who haven't.
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This isn't an investment in education, at least not purely, they could've had a much simpler building which was still perfectly
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The other thing that caught my eye was the k-12 label.
Does that really mean K-12 housed in the same facility, or it it some kind of project id.
Drug swapping gang bangers in with the teddy bear crowd just seems so bone headed I can't imagine it in any city.
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I had a decent education in second hand huts shipped in from a mining camp because there were enough teachers. These kids might get to run about in a palace but are likely to get an inferior education due to not enough teachers.
Waste of money (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, but something tells me this isn't what the hippies had in mind [northernsun.com] when they said "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale [blogspot.com] to buy a bomber"...
It doesn't matter whether the procurement chain diverts the money to defense contractors or for texbook publishers: a bureaucracy's first order of business is to protect itself by expanding its mandate - and by extension, its
Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Funny)
and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale [blogspot.com] to buy a bomber
To be fair, their lemon bars are the bomb ...
It's so nice to see (Score:3, Insightful)
Or am I thinking of some other location?
Almost there.... (Score:2)
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That was only for the rich. The average slobs went to a building just like we did - or no schooling at all.
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Unfortunately due to a lack of time, money and organization that tends not to happen in poore
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Open sitting areas could be a problem in some locations. Any children sitting outside in Austin today would likely burst into flames.
Re:Almost there.... (Score:4, Insightful)
And the invasive brain surgery and mind control.... Wait, I guess we're just waiting for the invasive brain surgery parts
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you mean by having it injected into their sub conscious while they are in a forced dream state, strapped down to a chair, and being programmed to killers, and being awoken from the dream by having a pen slammed into their head?
State-of-the-Art Swimming Pool? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:State-of-the-Art Swimming Pool? (Score:5, Funny)
Evian.
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Robotic lifeguards, hyper oxygenation to prevent drowning, etc.
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Hmm. You know, I've never thought about swimming in magnetic fluids until now. I wonder what it would feel like as you move through the field lines.
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Re:State-of-the-Art Swimming Pool? (Score:4, Informative)
This may seem like nothing, but swimming is a sport of hundredths of a second, so every little bit counts. There have been quite a few changes since I was swimming competitively- swimmers no longer wear tiny speedos, starting blocks are shaped differently so that the "track" starts are more effective.. there are lots of little things like this that help the latest generation of swimmers go a couple fractions of a second faster than the last.
Re:State-of-the-Art Swimming Pool? (Score:5, Insightful)
there are lots of little things like this that help the latest generation of swimmers go a couple fractions of a second faster than the last.
To which end the sport becomes a measure of both skill and technology, and the swimmers of today cannot be compared to the swimmers of yesterday even remotely objectively.
Re:State-of-the-Art Swimming Pool? (Score:4, Insightful)
So why don't attach propellers to the swimmers?
You practice sports in schools for the sake of exercise, spending $500 million for a few hundredths of a second doesn't seem to be the objective of a public school.
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I think it's a looong stretch. A swimming pool where world-class swimmers train doesn't have to be top-of-the-line, as long as it meets basic requirements. Vacuum gutters and whatnot are a bonus at best, not a basic requirement.
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That's all well and good but at the end of the day this is a pool for high school students, not Olympic athletes. I wonder what the premium was for incorporating all the fancy design compared to a normal low tech pool.
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Only in the top echelon, not high school or even the average college level. Also, if everyone is under the same conditions when competing, what does it really matter? The state champion is the state champion and will recieve attention from scouts.
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it's all about accountability (Score:5, Informative)
i would be happy to pay teachers and school administrators 6 figure incomes, provided they churned out highly educated students
but i'm sorry, if a teacher sucks, they should be fired. and unfortunately, for standing against this common sense measure, the teacher's unions has made themselves an enemy of higher quality education
the usa will fall in this world while other countries with a better grasp on how serious education is will rise. there really is nothing wrong with spending a lot of money on education. but HOW that money is spent, without any accountability, is going to destroy this country
Re:it's all about accountability (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to think the same thing, but then I realized something.
My daughter will not be getting the crap public education that other children get. She may attend public school, but I make sure that's supplemented with education at home. As a result, she is significantly ahead of her peers as far as the formal education is concerned, and she is already beginning to develop critical thinking skills ( that, frankly, most adults lack ).
My point is this; parents that care will make sure their children are well educated. Those that don't will provide future grunt labor needs. Our country can't survive without this critical resource. We can't all be astronauts, as the saying goes. As long as we are able to provide the basics ( reading/writing/math ) for the majority of citizens, our country will do fine. Those that need or want more education will always be able to get it, and those of us who want more for our children will always provide it.
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That's great and all.
Let me know how that goes in 50 years time, when only the small percentage of children whose parents do this are running in fear from the mobs out for food. :You fail to understand just what will happen if we follow your plan.
Regards.
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So...your plan is to, what? Make sure each and every child has a college education? And what would they do with that? Haul our garbage?
For society to function we need a certain distribution of education. The largest portion being the highschool educated.
But hell, it's the latest fashion to run around screaming the sky is falling. So don't let me get in your way.
Re:it's all about accountability (Score:5, Insightful)
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From my own experience, even if you catch a teacher flunking students intentionally you still can't get them fired. At least not if they have tenure.
You're confused. The problem is not one of flunking good students, it's one of passing poor ones to the next teacher in line, so they don't have to work on educating them.
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How can you tell who sucks, though? You can put the best teacher into a bad environment and they'll do poorly. You put them into a school where they're underpaid, the school barely has supplies, the students don't care that they'll never make it through school, the parents actively encourage them to not do homework, etc. Traditionally these are all the problems of inner city schools. They can be fixed with programs, supplies, and better paid teachers.
There are three people associated with a child in the
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Well put.
How can you tell who sucks, though?
Simple. You RTFA and see who's complaining and why. Even better, study the issue like Renraku who mentioned gangs as an important problem.
Here's the quote that got me, which nobody cared to address:
"New buildings are nice, but when they're run by the same people who've given us a 50 percent dropout rate, they're a big waste of taxpayer money," said Ben Austin, executive director of Parent Revolution who sits on the California Board of Education. "Parents aren't fooled."
How the fuck do you blame teachers for kids not showing up to school?
But instead of details like this and building costs mentioned in other posts, all we get on Slashdot is the standard anti-government rants. But nope, the small-government freaks hadn't the courage to stand up for their usual demands
K-12? (Score:2, Funny)
Administrative Offices (Score:3, Insightful)
A monument... (Score:4, Insightful)
What is this? Some kind of parody of everything that's wrong with America? Is the developer supposed to come out from behind the curtain and say, "you idiots! This was a test! You weren't supposed to actually approve this thing!"?
For better or worse... (Score:5, Informative)
Too fucking big (Score:4, Insightful)
Bigger schools means teachers and students are seen less as humans and just another tally mark to the administration. I could see the benefit if they have some good technical classes so they would have good and up to date tools to work with but other than that, it's just not good.
Cost does not mean quality (Score:4, Insightful)
Who approved this, and why weren't they fired? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Who approved this, and why weren't they fired?
Sadly, the citizens of the bankrupt state.
Every time (Score:5, Insightful)
Also (Score:5, Informative)
There's a reason for schools to look like thy do: It is a sturdy way to build things. When you have a building that is going to be frequented by a bunch of kids, who have no real investment or care in the well being of the building, it pays to build it to last. That means things like cinder-block walls (painted with heavy duty marine paint), tough, thin, carpet and so on. No it is not the peak of aesthetics but it does the job well. It takes abuse and hardly shows it. The high schools in my home town were like that and they aged very well. Sure it did have a "prison" look to it I guess but it held up to the students. You didn't have to repair holes in drywall all the time (hell I knocked a hole in my drywall and I try to be careful with that), you didn't have to repaint all the time, etc.
So it isn't just a matter of not spending a shit ton on a building, that could better go to teacher salaries and so on, but it is also a matter of longevity and maintenance. You want to put a building in place that you can use 30, 50, even 100 years from now all while being abused by students and you don't want to have to spend an arm and a leg doing it. That means some aesthetic compromises, but you'll get over it.
Hell I see that where I work (a university). My building is older, late 70s I think is when it was built. Main structure is brick, most floors are tough polyvinyl chloride, windows are a reasonable size and only in areas that matter and so on. It isn't the best looking building, but it holds up well. It can handle abuse (like having bigass servers moved around) well.
Next door is a new "dramatic" architecture building. Massive glass wall, exposed steel structure, etc. Ok cool... Except for all the problems. Cooling costs are astronomical, vandals brake the windows that make up the glass wall, the structure is rusting and so on. Has some ridiculous maintenance costs, many of which are simply being neglected.
Frankly, I'll take out "ugly" building. No it doesn't look as cool and the offices only have a normal window rather than a wall that is a window, but the damn thing holds up. It'll probably still be standing 30 years from now, not so sure about the building next door.
Too many agendas (Score:2)
One thing that I picked up from the article were the additional requirements imposed upon this project by siting it on a historic location. I've seen this situation before. Some group has a need, but no source for funds to accomplish their task. So they latch on to some agency with money to spend. The school district has one item on their charter: running schools. When someone else approached them with a project or precious piece of property to save, they should have run, not walked away.
Capital costs != operating costs. (Score:4, Informative)
Critics note that nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, the academic year and programs have been slashed, the district faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation's lowest performing.
Keep in mind that capital costs and operating costs are very different things when it comes to government accounting. Very often funds from higher levels of government are for capital costs only. Capital costs provide quick economic turnover which is something the government strives to do. If they hadn't built this school it doesn't mean the money would have gone to pay teachers. Not that I'm suggesting that the system is ok, just that you shouldn't necessarily criticize this particular project on these grounds.
Maintenance Cost (Score:5, Interesting)
blame it partly on the procurement process (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know about other states, but in CA once money is earmarked for construction (many times it's so-called "one-time" money, or money that came from a one time windfall), one is prohibited from using it for any other purpose. For instance, at my daughter's school district, the new annex just completed this year at the district office has leather couches, mahoghany accent tables, and marble floors in their reception area. All the money for the construction of this annex was earmarked years ago, when the economy was still "strong". Despite the fact that the actual monetary needs of the district are elsewhere (teachers anyone?), they cannot use the money for anything else, even though it would have made much more sense to go with cheaper materials and use the surplus from construction to fund instruction.
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Ah, the insanity of modern laws.
What on earth is the harm in NOT borrowing too much money. Borrow a billion dollars to build a bridge, and the project gets done for $750M - what to do with the extra cash. Do we:
A. Repay some of the bond with it (saving tons of public funds in debt repayment).
B. Blow the money on anything remotely bridge-related (let's repaint it 10 times in the first two years, put in a fancy lightshow, and pave it with gold).
Of course, we write the laws so that only B is a valid option
Does it run linux? (Score:2)
Absolute Insanity. (Score:2, Redundant)
Lay off 3,000 teachers and blow a half billion bucks on a school building. Jesus Christ! It isn't the kids that need an education it's the School Board and the county government that are completely ignorant and stark raving insane!
$578 Million for One School? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Do nerds only go to private schools?
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Even nerds that go to private schools pay taxes.
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Parents who care about their children help them overcome any nerdish tendencies.
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Parents who care about their children help them overcome any nerdish tendencies.
was that from Mein Kampf?
Re:News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters. (Score:4, Funny)
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My algorithm is broken, it always returns 42.
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Actually your algorithm is the correct one and everyone else's is wrong.
Re:News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nerds. Schools.
Schools. Nerds.
I'm pretty sure there's a connection there. As for the expense, that's what happens when you have a monopoly on money - you don't need to cut costs. You are free to spend as much as you want, because there's no competitor to undercut you with lower cost goods. Color me unsurprised.
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i wonder if nerds learn more outside of school, as they do not have to spend as much time dodging various pranks and such.
Re:News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters. (Score:4, Insightful)
I also don't understand the comment about 70s schools without windows. I went to schools that were built in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and they all had at least one window per room. I know because I used to stare out of it rather than listen to the boring teacher. (Maybe that's an argument for why windows are bad.)
Plus isn't the purpose of school to adjust kids to their future lives as adults? I certainly don't have any windows on my cubicle.
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If they knew exactly what they faced, they'd probably revolt and form a new society.
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that will be blockaded and invaded after getting branded a terrorist-communist haven by the capitalist aristocrats and their political hand puppets.
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Is it better that schools do to kids, what they did to me? Delude them into thinking the real engineering world is fun, with lots of girls in bikinis laying on the grass, studying textbooks or doing homework in the sun, and a new project to build every 4 months?
No. Better to have schools reflect reality. No girls (at least not where I work). No sun. No windows. And the same damn project for ten years (with just minor upgrades).
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at least your project have not gotten canceled and your department downsized.
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You have to remember that it's distinguished ... from a decent school.
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Really? My local school simply added new wings to the original school. First in 1987 (when I was there) and again in 2005. We never had to deal with those ugly trailers
I can think of better uses for $500 million (Score:3, Interesting)
dollars in the education budget, like improving science? They could have probably added enough computers to the LA school system to guarantee access to all students. The number of dollars here is just mind boggling. When a school system like LA is dropping teachers right and left over budget problems where is the criminal investigation to put the people who signed off on this?
If they had spent this money on something other than a school you can damn well bet people would be bitching "think of the childre
Re:I can think of better uses for $500 million (Score:5, Informative)
I was the Board Chair and was directly involved two years ago in building a very nice public school facility, custom designed, for 650 students. It cost $7.5 million to build. Factor in different locational-related costs and that'd be $9 million in LA. $13,846/student.
You'd have better efficiencies of scale to take advantage of in building a 4200 student school, but we'll pretend it should only cost about the same per student. You could say the LA school is going to be even way nicer and cost twice as much and I might buy that argument. You could say they have a bigger bureaucracy to deal with and that's going to double the cost per student again, making it 4x as big and while that's quite a monument to bureaucratic inefficiency, it's certainly believable.
For this school to cost literally 10x as much per student ($137,619/student) as the school we built... there's a lot of graft and people and/or organizations being bought off at that price. There's no other rational explanation for this level of cost.
I mean really, for $124K EXTRA per student they should at least have dorm rooms with bathrooms, etc... on site for all the students and staff....
Re:I can think of better uses for $500 million (Score:5, Interesting)
The expected lifespan of the building we built was 50+ years. It's a purpose-build modern public school with all the amenities like commercial kitchen, science labs, art labs, full size basketball gym, sports fields, playgrounds, common area, theater, music and language rooms, administration office space, parking lots, teacher prep rooms, library 3x the size of any other in the community, special education facilities, student gardens, sprinklers, internal steel fire and emergency doors, commercial wire plant, elevator, etc...
It's not like $9 million doesn't get you a lot, even today.... these guys spent almost $140K/student? There is no measurement by which that is a "reasonable" amount...
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Bare numbers?
You can't do simply use cost/pupil-year that the building will remain standing as a metric.
For example.
Spend 78 million on a new building, have 500 million left over.
Invest this with a return of 8%.
The returns will allow you to hire well over 500 extra staff.
And in 20 years, your initial 500 million is now around 1.2 billion.
Inflation will have torn into that somewhat - but you can still easily afford to knock the school down and build a new one.
I would also suggest that the students would perf
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Although I share your outrage, the idea that buying more computers will improve the quality of schooling is patently stupid. Think about it.
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I think not. Why is this on slashdot?
Because Slashdot is ad-supported.
Here's another fun fact: By asking questions like "why is this here?", you're generating more content for them to drive ad-views on.
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$20.5 billion
Re:Typical California (Score:4, Funny)
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Take, for example, a mandate that buildings have flushless urinals installed to save water. Yet, the same buildings often feature auto-flushing toilets which flush everytime you wipe your ass(that is, at least twice, and often more) where each flush has enough power to swallow a basketball-sized dump. Wasteful, and very hypocritical.
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Re:Perspective (Score:5, Funny)
There is no doubt a school could be built for less.
Were you tipped off by the fact that this is the most expensive public school?