Plays Well With Others

The School System…

I went to lunch with a friend yesterday and got onto the topic of schools and teachers. He’s in school to become one. It’s a long drawn out process that seems to be getting longer every year, because laws keep getting passed requiring teachers to take more and more tests. So, at this rate he might get that dream job at the rip old age of 50.

When we sat down at the table to eat there was a newspaper sitting on the table with two headlines. The main headline had to do with teachers fighting to get an approved contract, the second had to do with a high-speed bullet train getting it’s funding approved.

You can probably see where this is going. I find it funny that it’s so easy for a high speed train to getting millions of dollars in funding approved and the biggest fight will probably be where to place it. Meanwhile, teachers are fighting for another nickle or dime to fund their classrooms. Of course, the only thing I could come up with as an explanation is that this high speed train has a chance of being profitable, while school are NEVER profitable. School suck money and don’t have any way of giving it back, while the millions spent on a train could be recouped in a few years, at most.

From our discussion, I learned that most school don’t really have any kind of courses like Home Ec, Music or Art anymore and some don’t even have Physical Education on a daily basis anymore. For the most part, you have your math and your reading and of course, the football/baseball/basketball team, which probably would be the last thing to ever get cut.

Knowing all of this, my friend still wants to be a teacher. By the time he gets out of school, he’ll probably have a Masters Degree and even with that, he’ll be making less than I do. I guess the driving force is that whole “rewarding career” thing that some people strive for.

As I thought more about the situation, the only thing I could come up with was that schools need to find a way to become profitable. They could still receive money from the government, but somehow they need to figure out how to MAKE money.

A couple of solutions I came up with include:

Renting out the school: I never understood why cities build schools with all of these resources and then down the road they build a community center and parks and football fields and community theatres. Um, hello. If you just build a school with all of these things and then the school rents the different areas out to the community, wouldn’t that make money. For example, if the school has a stage theatre, the community could rent it out for their own performances or plays. Same for the football field. Rent that shit out for games. And the classrooms could easily be used for night school classes for adults. Again… making money. My idea is to spend a good amount of money on building great schools that serve both the community and the school that uses it during the day. Face it, most of the schools go unused at night and on the weekends anyway, so why not rent them out.

Corporate Sponsorships: I’m not talking about putting Pepsi machines in the schools, although in high school they did have a Pizza Hut and a Taco Bell in our cafeteria — which I don’t actually mind. I don’t really think its a schools responsibility decide on what kids should and shouldn’t eat. Ultimately its the parents responsibility to teach children the difference between healthy food and unhealthy food. If you give your kid money for lunch, then you’re turning them loose to make their own decisions. And if Taco Bell is willing to pay the school for that slot in the cafeteria, then more power to them. However, to go further, I wouldn’t mind some companies willing to pay the school to teach a course. For example, in my high school, we had a graphic design/printshop class. It was fun and gave us a good foundation on how to use a press, how to develop film in a darkroom and how the fundamentals of design work, but if a printing company or a design company had sponsored the class, perhaps we’d have been able to have newer computers or more tools available to us. Same with our science classes. My high school was located in the same area as this HUGE biotechnology company that is known all over the world. I don’t see why this company couldn’t sponsor a science class to provide more tools, books or resources. In the end, it only helps them out as a recruiting tool for their company. The school benefits and so does the company.

I’m sure there are a million other things that could be done to make some money. I’m not blaming the schools either. You have these parents who expect so much from the school system, but don’t give them any options to make money. Parents expect the school to act as a babysitter, feed their kids nutritional food, start bitching if the school puts in soda machines or gets a company like Taco Bell to pay for space. So for now these school are strapped with no way to appease anyone. And people like my friend who wants to become a teacher, and has to keep climbing this neverending staircase just to get to the top — where most people, once they get there, end up jumping off because they find that they don’t really like that type of work afterall.

Comments are closed.

3gp videos