As a teacher I often ask myself this question. As requirements for schools go up along with the costs of educating students the funding seems to go down. NCLB is supposed to be funded at about $39 billion this year but only about $24 billion has been appropriated for schools. The money that is supposed to fill that gap comes from the schools and states themselves if at all. What this means is that schools must find a way to make up the difference. Cutting corners and cutting costs are a way of life in public schools.
In the state of Arizona, where I teach, it is estimated that the cost implementing NCLB tests will cost between $39 and $108 million dollars. That money needs to come from some where.
This may be just one of those places:
In our school we have what are called "swamp coolers". These work simply by blowing cooler damp air to lower the temperature in the room. They can cut the cost of cooling buildings by about 80% or so compared to AC. For most of the year these work without a hitch. However, during monsoon season when the valley of the sun gets some humidity they tend to make the air...well...swampy.
The question arises as to what to do with the condensation that builds up from pumping wet air into the classrooms. Well, since building a school costs a great deal of money and school districts can't often afford spending lots of money, corners are often cut. Our school came up with a rather clever way to get rid of this water. Pipes are in the ceilings which let the water drain directly into our rooms. Not into a basin or into a water drain but simply a pipe was dropped down from the ceiling and the water spills into our rooms. I am sure the idea was that it only is humid a month or so of school so what’s the big deal with allowing water to freely flow into classrooms. I know we live in a desert but I don't need water that bad.
What purpose does this serve? Well, we don’t want moldy ceiling so we have to get rid of the water some how. So instead of having the pipes drain outside, the designers made what I can only consider a poor aesthetic choice and decided to have it drain into our rooms. We were informed about their leaking at the beginning of the school year during a faculty meeting in which the one in our large lecture hall was draining into a trash can in the middle of the room. When a colleague asked if there was a specific reason why the building was designed this way, the answer was something along the lines of, "that’s just how it is." We were told most of them wouldn't leak and that they would only do it a few times at the beginning of the year.
Now, these drains are not placed anywhere specific but sort of drop down in each room with no rhyme nor reason. Sometimes it’s dropped in the middle of the room, others along the sides, in the front, or maybe even in the back. One must either plan their room around the pipe or simply hope that it doesn't ever leak. When you have 34 kids (thank you underfunded American education system) in a room you are kind of forced to go with the latter. This being the case, a pipe was above a student’s desk in my room.
What’s a little water in the classroom, you ask? Does it affect learning? Ask the kid that it started draining onto during our third day of classes. We had just broken out our new history text books, when it happened. He jumped up shouting assuming someone had thrown water on him only to find that it was water from the heavens, aka the gods of poorly designed buildings. The pipe damaged a book, got a student a little wet and continued draining for the rest of the day into the trash can which could from then on be found "under the pipe." It wasn't a little water either; it was a pretty good stream, leaking about 2 gallons or more that day. It would continue to leak on and off during the rest of monsoon season. I would find myself speaking over what sounded like someone peeing the longest pee into a trash bag, moving desks so they wouldn’t get splashed on, drying out wet books, and admiring the new water stain growing on the carpet.
So we can't have moldy ceiling but we can have moldy carpets, wet students, flowing water in classrooms, and clearly what I would assume is a health code violation. But it saved the district some money. Money that can be better spent on standardized tests. After all, copper pipes are expensive. So next time you are thinking about the wonders of NCLB and how schools are coming up with the money to pick up the slack where the feds have not, remember the money has to come from somewhere.
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Now for some photos:
A close up the pipe in the ceiling.
A little farther back
Water damage to the carpet. As you can see, it leaves a pretty good splash zone.
A closer look at the water damage.
Another pipe in another class room.
The pipe in the faculty cafeteria (circled). Notice the waste basket underneath of it to catch the water? It was about a quarter full.