$350 million boondoggle
Californians are insane. This is not news but now we're at an entirely different level of madness:
$350 million high school finally opens in LA: "Much of what was then called the Belmont Learning Center was already constructed before fears grew about toxic gases rising from an old oil field upon which it was built."
There are 2,500 students. It took 10 years to build. It costs $250,000 per year to operate the toxic gas mitigation system. That's $352,500,000 for construction and operating costs from inception to completion. That's $14,100 per pupil just for construction cost ($352.5MM/(2,500 students * 10 years) = $14,100). That's before you even get to costs for payroll and overhead. According to "progressive" sources, CA spends $8,646 per student per year. That's $216,150,000 over 10 years. So let's combine the total cost of construction with operating costs of the gas system over that time and the cost of per pupil spending: $350MM + $2.5MM + $216MM = $568,650,000! Take that value and divide by number of students over those 10 years: $22,746 per student.
They could have funded each of these kids into private schools for half that and pocketed the difference. (Or, being California, sponsored some anarchosyndicalist communal art show or something.)
If California were run by Republicans they would have drilled for oil on that very spot and created a cooperative education program with student going to traditional school in the morning (funded by a % of the yield) and learned petroleum production in the afternoon.
$350 million high school finally opens in LA: "Much of what was then called the Belmont Learning Center was already constructed before fears grew about toxic gases rising from an old oil field upon which it was built."
There are 2,500 students. It took 10 years to build. It costs $250,000 per year to operate the toxic gas mitigation system. That's $352,500,000 for construction and operating costs from inception to completion. That's $14,100 per pupil just for construction cost ($352.5MM/(2,500 students * 10 years) = $14,100). That's before you even get to costs for payroll and overhead. According to "progressive" sources, CA spends $8,646 per student per year. That's $216,150,000 over 10 years. So let's combine the total cost of construction with operating costs of the gas system over that time and the cost of per pupil spending: $350MM + $2.5MM + $216MM = $568,650,000! Take that value and divide by number of students over those 10 years: $22,746 per student.
They could have funded each of these kids into private schools for half that and pocketed the difference. (Or, being California, sponsored some anarchosyndicalist communal art show or something.)
If California were run by Republicans they would have drilled for oil on that very spot and created a cooperative education program with student going to traditional school in the morning (funded by a % of the yield) and learned petroleum production in the afternoon.
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And Obama thinks CA should be a model for the nation....