**The views presented in this article solely reflect the views of the author and not the views on his friends, teachers, classmates or school administration as a whole. Any shared view is coincidental and should not be considered a bearing on the writer's thought process by itself, even if it has merit to do so.
Leave it to high schools to set some of the worst examples for spending their budget - over priced subpar food, facilities barely kept up to health standards, uninviting guidance rooms and piss poor holiday "fun dances" - poor management or greediness?
You would need to define what "poor management" and "greediness" mean to classify the situation properly.
Poor management would indicate that poor planning and half-baked thought were invested into how the school should be run. Staffing, various facilities, classrooms, to some extent the student council - an arm of the school governing body - and access to standard technology are included in, but not limited to the utilities dependent on the varying decisions made to spend a seemingly subpar budget each year.
This isn't to say that every functional body is completely dependent on this one factor. That is an erroneous assumption, but the maintenance arm of the school - the staff and place around it - seems largely dependent on the budget considering the main problem for seems to be financial.
Maybe the problem is not primarily poor budget investment. School budgets in Ontario are decided and endowed to schools by the Ontario Provincial government, and are only given so much a year. Not to mention that schools in Ontario are publicly funded - paid for with taxpayer money. No wonder every couple of years or so you will see a school (or coalition thereof) rallying for tax raises on spending towards education.
It's easy to see why. A typical starting amount for a school is between $100,000 and $275,000 before expenses are incurred and profits earned. A typical high school can expect to make about $15,000 net income after other profits earned and expenses incurred. This income is rolled over to the next starting school year. This income is typically spent on mundane expenses like roof repairment, janitorial clean-up and extra part-time staffing.
Around half of the annual school budget is expended on the essentials, and around two thirds of that remaining on the teachers facilities themselves. Because they come first in a school setting, right?
The school, and school as the collective has no bearing on the fact that sub-standard facilities and maintenance of those facilities are due solely to a small budget, as it appears. A school of any venue can operate just fine if, as demonstrated by an Ontario school that makes $20,000 profit on a $110,000 budget - yearly.
My own school, I think does worse than that in profit and has a higher revenue.
Where is all this excess capital disappearing to then?! Certainly not to the students! Not with crappy five-dollar a ticket dances with cheesy songs that apparently need to be remixed by a DJ just to get an atmosphere of "excitement". Yeah, no. An expensive ticket for a crappy dance? Does not compute. <.<
It seems to me, logically following, that the reason for my school's sub-par, overpriced burgers and palm-sized, four dollar a serving salads are due to irresponsible school administrators - in other words, greed. You would think that with what they have been given each year, they would at least redirect certain assets to their focus...such as the student's needs actually being addressed. If I have to research an in-class report on a Phillips 2000 computer again, I think I'll drop out of school >_>
My conclusion - it certainly isn't poor management of school finances- don't get me wrong, the schools know what they're doing with my parent's money and my classmates' money - they just don't care. It's not spending due to poor decisions because of inexperience or incompetence, but the school's apparent greediness.
/rant and analysis
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