Pissing Away Money

Remember this when the schools raise their portion of the property taxes to the max limit again:

• Thrust into online learning during the pandemic, Chicago Public Schools spent hundreds of millions in federal COVID-19 relief money on laptops and other devices over the past few years, heralding a monumental shift for a school system in which computer access was limited to one where it’s now plentiful.

  But CPS dived headlong out of the tech dark ages without strong tracking systems and has failed to upgrade them in recent years. Now, CPS’ inspector general says as many as 77,000 devices — worth more than $23 million — were marked as lost or stolen in just one year.

  Some of those devices didn’t disappear but were simply sitting on shelves or in desk drawers unaccounted for, CPS IG William Fletcher said in his 2023 annual report, blaming a flawed inventory system he said needed “serious overhaul.” And CPS rarely used a tracking system to find its computers despite spending $3 million on it.

The schools have always been bastions of corruption and waste, and the "watchdog media" who are supposed to look out for taxpayers, instead covers for the continuous scandal and waste:

• entire schools with principals, staff, engineers and more, operating at under TEN PERCENT of capacity;
• hundreds of sex assaults by teachers and other employees, many documented, most ignored;
• nearly eighteen years ago, we wrote about dumpsters full of books - still wrapped in plastic and stored on shipping pallets - tossed in the trash, never utilized and supposedly "out-of-date" within a year of purchase;

And now millions in "lost/stolen" computers that even had tracking software installed. 

You know why the tracking software wasn't used? Because the "school-to-prison-pipeline" is the cops fault and the CTU wasn't going to have its members providing the impetus for another minority child to have a police record. So school administrators (or their minions) would show up at the desk with a list of computer equipment that was "unaccounted for," get an RD number, the dicks would close the case, and no doubt CPS would file an insurance claim for the property - much of which probably ended up in storage closets, in dumpsters as "damaged," or in someone's basement.

And their pet Conehead isn't going to hold them accountable.