This is True #624 Mentioned a newspaper article in the local rag, the Austin American Statesman, concerning Kealing Middle School getting a $9 million facelift. The facelift includes new student lockers, even though the current student lockers have been sitting empty for 10 years. The principal of the school banned their use due to ‘contraband’ and other excuses. The new lockers will cost $60,000, and they will also sit unused.
Citizen appeals to re-allocate the money had fallen on deaf ears. Which doesn’t surprise me, having dealt with AISD and their construction staff several times in the past. Logic isn’t something that they seem to have an abundance of over there.
As an example, my last job…
…The architect I was working for came up in rotation for a couple of schools that were going to be renovated. As I had experience with AISD renovation projects before, I was asked to lead these projects as well. My employer stressed to me that I needed to take the initiative here, that I needed to make sure and handle everything that needed to be done, because “that’s how you keep the AISD project manager happy, making sure that he doesn’t have anything to do”.
Which I found quite interesting, at the time. I happen to know that architects who work for AISD make well above market average for the experience that they require, having applied for some openings at AISD in the past (openings for which, I’m quite certain, my politics excluded me from consideration for) so the concept of doing all the work for a better compensated (twice as much as I was making) government employee, just so he would be happy, didn’t sit well with me.
After all, the whole basis of public schools comes from the concept of Kantian-Fichtian selfless service; i.e. school district employees should be doing their jobs for the good of the community, and not be expecting any compensation in return, much less compensation at a higher rate than their privately employed peers. However, reality works in line with the Objectivist-Capitalist rewards system, and nobody is easier to fleece than a willing, tax-paying public; therefore public servants generally do get paid better than any other group.
So I go out with my employer to visit the sites and discuss project scope with the AISD representatives. As I’m walking through the schools with this Gucci & silk shirt wearing reprobate, I notice the extremely dilapidated condition of several of the portable buildings that the children will be housed in. A good portion of the schools in Texas have entire little shanty towns of these buildings parked behind the brick and glass permanent facilities that front the streets; putting their best face forward, literally. They hide these buildings from view like the eyesores that they are, and I doubt that most parents realise that their children are even in them. As a professional who is tasked with public safety as a part of licensing, I can’t get away from the fact that children are housed in them day in and day out.
So I mention the state of the portables to this Gucci & silk shirt wearing reprobate, this public servant that is nothing of the kind, and suggest that perhaps the renovation money should be used to build additional buildings, rather than be used to do cosmetic upgrades to the existing brick and mortar structures (which housed less than half the children at the schools in question) and the landscaping that is also visible from the fronting street.
His reply? Can’t do that, it would take real money to build new buildings. His exact words; real money. Now, I have to admit that it would have taken more than the million or so dollars that they had set aside for these little cosmetic upgrades that they were doing. However, you spend a million here and a million there, and pretty soon all the real money is spent on things that aren’t important to the big picture. That big picture being the education of Texas’ children.
Needless to say, I didn’t get the pleasure of working on those projects. Actually, I was fired not too long after that walk through. Coincidence? Most likely. All I know is, I’d rather be an unemployed architect than a knee-crawling toady for a public servant that doesn’t know the meaning of the term.
I look forward to a society where ethics and morals are rewarded, so you can be an honest and employed architect. Rome is falling and George W. Nero is happily playing the fiddle. If more people had balls like you, maybe we will be able to prop the country back up before it’s too late.