Just checked my old elementary school, and surprisingly they’re gone and what looks like new permanent buildings in another location! They were there as of 2 years ago, but now it’s extra blacktop and and even more recently a solar panel array. It took about 3 decades but they finally did it.
Public schooling has gotten so strange over the last 2 decades. All these trailers, teachers begging for supplies. Would be surprised if there was some group that was trying to error public education. Is there a benefit to keeping a group of people uneducated?
uneducated people are easier to exploit
Yes, they will buy Apple phones. That is to say, fall head-first into consumerism.
They were using those trailers back in 1985, but they weren’t calling them temporary, it was just the only way they could afford to add classrooms instead of cramming more students in. I was even sitting in one of those watching the space shuttle failed launch on a tv on a cart with a vcr on the lower shelf.
ahh yes the “portables”
in aus they were called demountables. but i never saw a single one demounted. the ones at my old primary school are still there 30 years later.
Yeah, we called them “Portables.” They were there long before I came, and will be there long after I am dead. Long live our plywood fortresses.
For me it was containers like these:
Long live our tin fortresses
At least you had windows. My kids are in a pretty new school building, but most of the classrooms are located in the middle of the building without windows and natural light. Seems like another one of those “only in America” things.
My school had several holes in the middle of the building to avoid this. Most of them just have gravel at the bottom
Yeah the “middle” was the school yard surrounded by narrow buildings
What’s with the cable at the top between sections?
Not only at the top, there’s also cables at the bottom between sections and what looks like a cable duct mounted in front of it with a bunch of cables coming out at the top
The cable duct looks like ac lines, and the yellow cables at the bottom are probably grounding
Demountables for us
In our town, one of the schools was just built 5 years ago. They built it without classrooms. Not a single one. They had a gym, common areas, admin offices, IT infrastructure (office with a server room became the councillors office and the IT guy needs to ask permission to use it lol), bathrooms and library. They designed it so it could be made entirely with portables. From the onset.
My charter school operated similarly to this. In a sense it’s kinda smart on dwindling budgets. If the portables are decent enough it allows the school to rearrange or expand without massive construction/demolition costs.
In the end most classrooms don’t need a whole lot, right?
Speculation, of course. Just for once I hope there’s not some evil cynical reason behind the way things are done lol .
They designed it so it could be made entirely with portables.
wtf…
Right? To be fair, they used some of the nicest portables I’ve ever seen. Two portables to a class, windows, a semi permanent foundation, plumbing, HVAC hookup, networking, the works. I had to install WAPs in the drop tile, and it was not the worst thing I’ve had to do there.
swanky!
Nothing more permanent than a temporary government installation.
Welcome to government funding.
School District: we need a new school
Enrollment: 4200
Government: Awesome, here’s $4.2 million, go build the 4200 student school.
SD: Uhh, won’t that take a few years? Should we add some buffer space to the plan?
Government: ehh, naah
Spongebob 3 years later: Welcome to Springfield High School!
Enrollment: 6900
Springfield: see, gooberment, we needed more classrooms!
Gooberment: heh, would you look at that. Lol. Well, use your budget to build some portables.
SD: Us? Why don’t you pay!?!?
Gooberment: Oh, haha, yeah, that’s an operating expense. We only fund capital projects! Don’t worry, give us a plan to expand and we can fund you in 10 years
10 years later: Ok gooberment, our numbers say we need 15 classrooms. But for the expansion, we should do 25 for future proofing
Gooberment: Oh, but you only need 15 now? Yeah here’s money for 15
2 years later: Here’s 15 classrooms!
SD: We need 25…
Gooberment: Oh, yeah, get some portables and talk to us in a few years!
Rinse and repeat
was really confused how spongebob fit into this story for awhile
Ah yes, the “portables” that never moved. They’re still at my old school, decades after I’ve left they’re still in the same damn spots.
I just checked my old elementary school online. Nearly 40 years later, the same temporary buildings I had class in are still there.
“Nearly forty years ago? This person must be old,” I thought. Then I did the math on how long I’ve been out of school. Oof. Sorry for judging your age, fellow millennial.
Decades are a temporal unit
My 4th grade classroom looked exactly like this.
Walking through the snow in the Canadian winter from your warm school hallway to the portable for that one class was always torture.
In Norwegian we have this (little known) word ‘permasorium’, describing the everlasting provisions like these.
I like it! In German we call temporary solutions a “Provisorium” and often say that they stay for ever (Nichts hält länger als ein Provisorium). I like the idea of making a permanent Provisorium into a single word!
For anyone interested: This meme has been posted by bots to a Reddit community I was active in back then very often.
A bot would mirror these Reddit posts in a Discord server and because this exact meme has been posted there so often, it became an insider at some point, with various people always posting this meme again (because that was itself funny).That’s why I can’t take this meme seriously at all.
Why the hell are you taking a meme seriously in the first place. You see it, laugh if it resonates and move on.
laugh if it resonates
That’s what I mean with taking it seriously. You see it and its contents genuinely as the joke it displays.
In our group, it just became a meta-level-joke because we’ve seen it so often by spam bots and the joke was to re-post it as the newest most original joke one has ever thought of (but without it mattering what’s actually on the image); and that was funny.
Had to go check my elementary school on street view… Yup, still there since 30 years ago. Painted at least!
One time I shoved a crayon in the lock on one of these hoping class would be cancelled.
Instead we had to stand outside until the custodian showed up and fixed it.
How many revolutionary acts go
I remember showing up for tenth grade, looking at the list of assigned classrooms in the first day of the school year. Instead of the usual the digit number, it said “C1”. My classmates showed up, and we’re just as confused as I was.
The C turned out to be short for “container”, which we found in a corner of the school grounds.
That said, being able to quickly go outside in every break was pretty neat. And the school actually did get a second building only a few years later.
