10 Dumb Things Schools Did To Save money It’s no secret that education is an expensive affair. Despite this though, school funding always seems to come up short. But schools have to keep running. And an extra buck can go a long way.
So to have that extra cash, schools have had to get creative. Sometimes too creative that the stuff they do is right out…dumb.
Here’s a list of 10 of these dumb things schools have done for the extra dollar.
#10 Serving Awful Lunches
Let’s be clear here – you wouldn’t expect a school lunch to be anything near to what you’d eat at home. The food is more like a formality and you’ll be lucky to get something that’s both healthy and tasty. So yep, it’s bound to be a bit unpleasant.
But schools have come under fire for an entirely different reason – serving food that is way past its best before date, especially meat.
Well, preserving the surplus for later use isn’t a bad idea. The problem arises when the time between storage and use is just too long. And when we say long we’re not talking about a week or a month. Think 5 or more years!
Yes, schools have been found to preserve their meat for that long and still have the nerve to serve the same during lunchtime. This happened mainly in the Hawkins County school system in Tennessee where students were served pork that had expired more than 5 years prior.
To make it a bit tasty, the cafeteria manager directed the lunchroom staff to cover it with gravy.
You would think such schools will be gracious enough to issue the good old apology but they stuck it out. They pointed out that the expiration dates were merely recommendations rather than restrictions. Parents were also assured that the expired meat was harmless the only caveat being that it had lost most of its nutritional value.
And some schools make it mandatory for each child to have this kind of food. So if a student turned up with their own fresh and somehow healthier food, it will be confiscated in exchange for meat from the last decade.
#9 Renting Out School Property
It turns out that schools have a lot of in-demand assets that can be rented out to fetch a healthy dollar amount. Talk of fax machines, copiers, and parking spaces.
And since schools don’t run all-year-round, they are using these assets to get that additional dollar for their budgets.
One school in Grapevine-Colleyville, Texas, for instance, made a nice additional income renting out its property. They used their office equipment to print documents for a local city government and ended up with an additional $30,000. They didn’t stop at that.
Looking around, they discovered they had lots of unused parking spaces around the football stadium. They sold this off to nearby office workers netting another $87,000 side earnings.
With both of these incomes, the school was able to afford the salary of two teachers. We guess that wasn’t so dumb after all.
Sometimes when renting out isn’t an option, selling is just as effective. One school in Oregon, for instance, had to sell a cow someone had donated, raising $1,700 for their baseball team. Again, doesn’t seem so bad.
#8 Renting Out Kids
If you thought property was the only thing schools rent out to raise money then you better think again. Schools have now gone as far as renting out…kids!
This is when you know the cash crunch has hit quite hard.
In this case, the school children are treated as one of the school's assets and are sent out on income-generating errands for the school. And the errands here vary.
Basically, they’re just chores that the schools send the kids on. But instead of the kids being paid for the work, the money is wired directly to their schools. The chores here may include things like gardening, general cleaning work, lawn mowing, and so on.
Slavery? Child exploitation? Or is it child labor? You decide. But hey, anything for those extra funds.
#7 Cheating In Test Scores
Funds are allocated to schools with regards to the performance of their students. That is the better the performance in a standardized test, the more money the school will get. That’s at least true for most states.
The assumption here is that schools that do well are putting in work to get those shiny results; which might be true to an extent. So they’re rewarded with more funds to keep up with the good work. And for those that seem to post below par grades? Same less-than enough funds for them.
So schools have decided to exploit this to their advantage by messing with the test scores. For better test scores, schools are cheating for their students in the crudest ways. In Atlanta and Baltimore, schools were caught manually erasing students’ wrong answers and replacing them with correct ones.
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