Was thinking about a conversation I had with a friend of mine a few years ago, and I began to think about how the spending at my old high school and the affiliated district was allocated. Now, I grew up in the great Midwest, which I suppose carries a few liabilities with it.
It seems like the majority of spending my school district was allocated to sports programs. Now, I’ve got nothing against sports, aside from a slight worry about the jock-based heirarchy that existed at the time (does this even still exist?), but the amount of money spent on sports at my high school was, for lack of a better term, completely retarded.
My senior year of high school was in 1994, and a few things stick out in my mind. Our computer labs were saddled with Apple IIe computers, which were easily ten to twelve years old at the time. My history book dated from 1983, and my math books were rarely any better. Chris tells me that his physics book dated from early 1977, making it slightly older than he was.
But for some reason, spending a million dollars to rebuild the football stadium at the school wasn’t much of a problem.
Are things still like this? Does anyone have any memories that sort of relate to this? I’d love to hear them.
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12/13/2004 at 11:57 pm
paulehr
Yeap it was like that at a local public high school in my town. They dropped a ton of money on the athletics and hardly anything on academics. All the non-jock kids ended up protesting and the school told them in a way tough shit, then they got their asses beaten up by the football team.
I think its pretty screwed up when we place more value on sports and athletics then education. No wonder why the rest of the world is kicking our ass in the education department.
12/15/2004 at 2:00 pm
WildBill
Yeah, i had the same problem in college. The school (San Diego State University) was something like $11 billion overbudget, so rather than make cuts elsewhere, the president of the school grabbed a class catalog and started saying “Eliminate this major, eliminate this major…” My major (Industrial Technology) was one of the ones killed off in this purge, and since I would have had to re-do two or more years of work to pickup a new major (I was a senior at the time) I never did finish my Bachelor’s degree.
The irony is that the new library annex (which was dedicated with the president’s name), the new football stadium (the team before that played at Jack Murphy Stadium, where the Chargers played), and the “activity center” (basketball stadium) were all construction projects that were started and completed in the time I was attending that school.. I’m sure that the $11 million was small change compared to the total amount spent on those three boondoggles.
12/19/2004 at 10:18 am
Nikki
Still the same nowadays, sayeth the high school teacher. At least they’ve started pay-to-play to offset some of the costs of the sports without completely shredding academics to the bone.