I've never went to a school board meeting before, but I really wanted to have a question answered so I decided to go. A few weeks ago I was told by a school employee that a project, a remodel of a intermediate school, was $20M over budget. $20M overbudget for a school remodel?? That's why I went. I arrived at 5:30pm, the board meeting was called into session and I was promptly escorted out of the auditorium because there was an executive session and the public wasn't invited. Oh well. I met a lady in the cafeteria and we began to chat. She has three kids in this school district. At 6:30pm we were invited back into the auditorium and the meeting continued. Lots of agenda items, some perked my ears up, some were hohum. A school employee named Steve, I later found out he was the grand poobah of the physical building guru(sorry I don't know his title), stood up and proceeded to explain how the remodel of the intermediate school was progressing. $15M has been spent as to date with a total cost over run of about a million. He explained in detail on why the overruns happened and I fully understood what he was saying.
The meeting lasted about two hours but what really frightened me was the lack of people in the audience. Only myself and the lady with three kids were present. That's it. A school district with about 2000 kids and probably 10K+ residents and only TWO people show up for a school board meeting.
Is this common for other parts of America? If so then I completely understand why our schools are turning out dolts. No parental oversight of the board members. No input. No nothing to keep the school board on a path which most parents want. I plan on seeing the Superintendent of the school system and the guy named Steve. Pick their minds and express my wishes on how to make the school a better place for the kids. Somehow the board wants to spend large quantites of money on buildings but the average percentile this school system has, compared with the entire state, is around 37% for reading comprehension and 43% for Math. Something is not quite right in this district. Maybe I'll figure it out.
If you have suggestions on how to raise the percentile rates please let me know.
Follow the money. I’m sure you will find what’s up.
This is the hard part - we've analyzed budgets, they are seemingly all accounted for. But the OP is right, school boards tend to spend WAY more money than they should on projects. I've got no evidence but it seems very likely that there may be MASSIVE kickbacks for things like:
New building/expansion budgets going way over on spend
COVID 19 policies
Trans/Racial policies/curricula
Why do I say this? Because it's happening in the majority of the Country, all at once. That is not a coincidence.
I think they are fleecing us in many of these school boards - but under the direction and coordination of whom?
How do we find that out? How do we analyze the budgets and where it was SPENT! Not how it was allocated originally. Who is pulling the strings? Putting together FOIAs is one thing (easy), but what do you ask for?
I used to work for an architect that only did schools and other public works projects. The amount of red tape needed for public works projects drives up the cost considerably. Also, at least around here, only union contractors were allowed to bid jobs. Prices for stuff reliably ran 50-100% more than private sector.
Add to that if anything comes up that was unexpected in the project then the contractor gets to charge another 75% markup for having to change their bid. I once heard about a toilet that needed to be moved about 5 ft. After plans had been bid but before ground had been broken. This change cost the school district $25,000.
Yes, and the battling egos of the administration also affect this. I work for a school district and we recently had a new building put up. Everything was agreed upon and then one of the Directors did a tour and threw a fit about where the outlets were. She made the electricians/architects relocate all of them - it cost a fortune in change orders.
But there's always some big wig who wants a larger window/bigger office/etc to appease their over-inflated sense of self worth.