Holding to a budget

A perfect example of cognitive dissonance. From Las Vegas station KTNV:

You Paid for It: CCSD spends $1 million on iPads
More than $1 million in just six months: That's what the Clark County School District has spent buying iPads, all at a time of massive budget cuts that will likely result in more than 1,800 layoffs, crowded classes, and students without enough basic supplies.

So is this technological luxury helping kids or killing budgets? You decide because you paid for it.

One teachers thoughts:

Sharon Lea, who taught for 15 years, says, "I saw a consistent pattern of them spending millions of dollars on the latest gimmick, the latest fad. But yet, they would tell the teachers there wasn't money for paper, there wasn't money for crayons, pencils. And so teachers spent thousands of dollars of their own money buying those things."

And a bit on the school system itself -- answering a request for information:

Though the school district showed Contact 13 one class using iPads at Wynn Elementary, we found many are in the hands of administrators. So we asked the district how many are for administrators, how many are for teachers, and where the funding comes from.

They answered with a mountain of documents.

For the month of time it took them to put it all together and send all the photocopies, they charged us more than $1,100 - or the price of two iPads.

We wondered why the Purchasing Department, with its own two iPads, couldn't pull up the info with a couple of key strokes. After all, there must be an app for that.

Instead, Contact 13 crunched the numbers and found that the district spent nearly $1.1 million on 1,859 iPads over the last six months.

And although there is $136,000 more on school district credit cards for purchases from Apple stores, because the information isn't centralized, the district couldn't tell us exactly what was bought.

The administration needs to have term limits. Don't allow the deadwood to build up like this...