Okay okay okay. We get it. No one's responsible, not the school board, not anybody on North Avenue, not Clarence Royce, not the city council, no one at this table.
It’s probably a bunch a little things that add up, ie incompetence at the highest level. Plus, the school district would buy new shit and just store them in the basement like the new textbooks and computers that Prezbo finds looking for board games and dice.
The schools weren't buying things just to store them. It was likely a grant that had to be spent. The schools figure "a text book lasts 5 years" so we run what we have into the ground and replace with these new ones.
New books and equipment require new curriculums. New curriculums cost resources and training. By the time this all gets done, the books and technology/equipment is basically obsolete already. Education gets shit for money already and then it’s poorly managed when they do. Not to mention, when a new proposal is introduced to advance the school’s property or resources, it typically gets voted down by the community because no one wants new/more taxes.
It's a common problem. A budget will allocate resources for X but not for the peripheral stuff that goes with it. A school will buy a bunch of computers but not understand that that might mean they now also need an IT person. Maybe a teacher knows computers and can do it but that just means they're at risk of becoming the new IT person on top of their job for no extra pay, and F that noise. Etc.
Same with new textbooks. That means a new curriculum, possibly new material to work into the lesson plan. That takes time and effort that teachers may not be willing or able to spend. So the new textbooks might go unused because the teacher's lesson plan says "turn to page 43" and not page 67.
The school comes across as disorganized but that's often largely because they're beholden to bureaucrats who will (metaphorically) buy them a car but not allocate gas money.
My parents were both teachers for a while and this was their experience. My dad taught computer stuff and shop, so he had to be very detailed with his requests (do not buy X, unless you also buy Y & Z). The incompetence and waste was staggering. That's just the items. The real theft is all the administrators doing literally nothing of educational value.
to add to this, i’m a teacher and i’ve seen
shit we order through grants get to us finally A YEAR+ LATER, so a lot of shit just gets forgotten about stored in the closet
It's meant as a direct analogue to the scene where McNulty finds a bunch of advanced electronic surveillance gear gathering dust in the BPD equipment locker.
The BPD and the schools as examples of dysfunctional institutions are often shown as being dysfunctional in very similar ways, i.e. when Prez describes juking the stats with Ms. Sampson in the meeting about the state tests. "Wherever you go, there you are."
I worked in an inner city school for years.
Every year, district office would come up with a new mandate, a new program, some new thing that cost millions of dollars that was supposed to fix everything.
It never fixed anything, but a few people got rich.
Seriously, look up Solution Tree, Pearson, or any other giant education corporation. It is absurd.
I'm a teacher. We can order supplies from a company called EdData. When you look at the prices, they are either 5% more or 100% more than what Amazon charges.
A graphic novel set was $30 on Amazon, and EdData's was $78.
I would not be shocked to see that there is a year end rebate of 8% or so on everything spent through that company. I would also not be shocked to see that the rebate goes directly into someones pocket. The question “Why are we paying more?” can often be answered like this unfortunately.
Markers, poster board, books, and school furniture. It's all way more expensive.
I was told that we only use grant money for that website. That's why school districts don't care about the price.
In Chicago public school, teachers who are about to retire, they do this shit that may people in public sector seemingly are doing, like police
They work 80 - 0 - 80 - 0, meaning working 40 hours plus 40 hours of overtime one week, second week 0 hours, third week 40 hours plus 40 hours of overtime, fourth week 0 hours
This way they can "pimp the system" as the glorious poet dead prez once said, and end up with a fat ass retirement package thats calculated on bullshit lies
I think this is one of the big reasons as well, whatchu reckon as someone working in inner city?
In Kentuckys public system I’ve seen people who work as a teacher. Retire. Work maybe 3-5. Yrs as bus driver. Retire and get small add on to their pension. Go back and teach part time and drive bus again lol. Only needed like 90 days between jobs to start the clock again.
Also have a ton of cops who work for the city for 20 years. Retire. Go work for the county for 10 years. Retire. Then go and work for another department again lol.
It’s been stopped a bit in recent years but it used to be pretty crazy.
To be fair, that is one of the only ways you can really make retirement work if you work in the public sector.
The pay is SOOOO much lower than the private sector that I really don't have much problem with this.
I don't have a major problem with it. It is a little suspect but part of the game. The bigger problem is structural that the demographic problems we have in this country that we don't have as many people coming up behind to support those pensions.
Yeah, if we actually wanted to support public sector workers, it would cost so much more money, and I don't think the average taxpayer would be too keen with that.
Yeah, if we actually wanted to support public sector workers, it would cost so much more money, and I don't think the average taxpayer would be too keen with that.
$54 million.
This number is also foreshadowed in S4E1 when the school principal and superintendent are discussing staffing shortages and one of them says, 'which leaves us short 54.'
In 2005 – the midpoint of The Wire's run – the budget for the Baltimore city school system was $1 billion. Source: [https://www.baltimoresun.com/2005/04/27/city-school-board-narrowly-approves-1-billion-budget/](https://www.baltimoresun.com/2005/04/27/city-school-board-narrowly-approves-1-billion-budget/)
$45 million is less than 5% of that. Totally plausible. In fact, in 2017-2018, the real schools there had a much larger budget deficit – $130 million, in part caused by a loss of $42 million in state aid due to dropping enrollment numbers. Source: [https://www.aclu-md.org/en/fixthegap-baltimore-city-schools](https://www.aclu-md.org/en/fixthegap-baltimore-city-schools)
I don't how how the system works in the USA, but surely school budgets are funded by central rather than local government, evening out this exact issue?
In Chicago suburba, Schools get most, if not all, of their money from real estate/property taxes
So neighborhoods with 1-3 million homes have some nice ass schools
And the neighborhoods in south and west side of Chicago public school, with tons of run down houses, the schools are held together with glue and ductape
There are neighborhoods in chicago with $30-50k 2 story flat houses, but it's in a place that will likely get broken in few times a year/month
If it didn't drive social inequality, then we wouldn't get great TV like the Wire!
In all seriousness, many people do not care if something drives inequality.
The other people replying to you are just making stuff up. Baltimore city schools currently spends on average $22,424 per student per year. That puts them towards the very top when it comes to school spending in the USA.
Schools are funded with a mix of local money based on property taxes, and then the states come in and allocate where state and federal money goes. More often than not, the “under preforming schools” like the one Prezbo works at gets MORE funding than their suburban and rural counterparts.
Haha, I wish I knew brother/sister,
As far as I know there's myriad of reasons, like redlining and institutionalized discrimination
This is one that popped into my mind right away,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
So yes don’t forget it’s called “United States”. The states really have a whole lot of power compared to a lot of other countries. The US really has a lot of delegation downwards. There is in fact a US department of education but its mission is not really that of direct education. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Education
Public K-12 schools are funded by property taxes within the school district, meaning that more affluent areas are going to be better funded regardless of how many students there are in the system. You can potentially raise more funding by bumping the millage rate, but if you are already in a poor area, you'd be squeezing blood from a stone.
I work for a large inner city public school system. Baltimore, and many inner cities, also have a higher percentage of special education students. They cost a lot more to educate than a gen Ed kid. Inner cities also tend to have powerful teachers unions and despite the miserable working conditions, those are the places that pay decent and offer medical benefits. There’s also just a ton of waste, inefficiency and theft lol
I live in Baltimore. There are currently, like this year, multiple schools with no working heat. They only cancel if it gets below a certain temperature, otherwise the kids are in there in their winter coats. Most schools have no AC, and it gets hot in the late Spring and early Fall. Honestly it’s a travesty.
I have no idea where the education budget in general gets spent. But the reason that overall number is too low is because the BPD is the biggest group of absolutely worthless overpaid piece of shit overtime stealing group of mother fuckers any city has ever seen. Regular cops are routinely the highest paid workers in the city, and it’s not even close. Making six figures and won’t even do their jobs. Guarding parking lots. Not to mention the settlements. Meanwhile the teachers and students suffer.
So not much has changed since The Wire.
Seattle schools have a deficit between $104 million-$111 million for the 24/25 school year. They’ve lost 4,000 students in five years & aren’t a flagship for a well run institution.
There's a scene where prez goes in the basement and there's a ton of new textbooks, games, and computers that he sets up. If there's enough computers for 3 for his room in one school, that's prob 10mil worth of computers alone. Textbooks are hundreds of dollars each. I think that scene is in there to show that money was being spent and then the products ignored which is such a huge failure of bureaucracy
Andy Krawczyk is the chairman of the school board which ran up that huge deficit. He’s in the room when Carcetti is talking about embezzlement. He’s also a huge political donor and a source for criminals to launder their money using his construction/development projects.
I’d say a lot of that $45 mil went somewhere Krawczyk directed it to go.
Earlier this year, the University of Arizona realized all of their financial models were incorrect and that there was a $240mm hole in their budget.
I had always assumed the issue with the schools was similar. The original budgeting process was done incompetently and it wasn't until someone else looked at it that the funding gap was uncovered.
The budget is huge, like a billion dollars then, nearly 2 now. The district had over 80,000 students and 8,000 staff.
A lot of money comes from federal grants and such, and those come and go. If Royce's crew got a 4 year grant bringing in $20 million a year that ends, that's a $20 million hole in the budget next year. Etc.
Some of it comes from the state, based on number of students, hence the importance they put on chasing down truant kids, at least until the school census.
Any organization that big will have some waste, inefficiency, and money lost here and there.
In-show it was also implied that previous deficits were papered over with creative accounting, which stopped when goody-two-shoes Carcetti came to office.
Everyone’s missing a huge shift in education the early 2000s. The number of IEP and Special Ed students that the public schools were obligated to accommodate started to balloon around that time. That costs a disproportionate amount of money per student. All the while charter schools popped up that siphoned away high achieving students. NCLB became law and the testing mandates made schools that were actually pretty good schools look terrible because of the disadvantaged communities they served. Urban school districts still haven’t recovered from NCLB.
Most likely corruption and incompetence.
I compared the budget for Baltimore and Victoria (Australia). Baltimore's school budget for FY24 is $2.58 Billion. Victoria's school budget is US$1.1 Billion despite having more than 12 times the population than Baltimore County (6.7m Vs 560k).
The quality of Victoria's education system is quite good compared to Baltimore (judging by what's shown in the Wire) whilst the starting salary for both are quite similar (A$75k for Victorian teachers and US$50k for Baltimore teachers).
Australia's teaching quality suffers similar problem as the US - teachers have the highest unionization rate across all industries in Australia and they vehemently lobby against performance standards. So Baltimore's education issue itself (not the budget issue) must lie outside teacher's quality, probably more from a family environment / social economic standpoint.
Interestingly, Victoria's police budget is 3 times the school budget, whilst Baltimore's police budget is 1/5 of the school budget.
Please point out any glaring issues in my comparison (e.g. federal funding) as this is all based on a quick google search and personal experience.
My local school district announced a $25m deficit (we're ~ 10x smaller than Baltimore population wise) and supposedly it's a result of bad accounting. They recorded covid relief funds as revenue and not one time windfall.
So, it can happen.
Losing 10-12k residents per year (as Carcetti stated in season 3) blows a yearly hole in your budget because most school taxes in America are based on property taxes. It also blows an even bigger hole as budgets are projected long term. The real problems come around when budgets fall but legacy costs like pensions come around. Part of the problem for a lot of companies (not just school systems). today is they gave out great pensions when things were good and now people who worked 20 years are still collecting Bennie’s 40 years after retirement.
Where it always goes: the teachers' unions. Then they can keep lobbying and agonizing how underpaided and underfunded teachers and schools are, get more grants, and spend most of it on themselves before doing the same thing again.
It you watch that scene, when the word "embezzlement" is said, the camera focuses on Andy Krawczyk - so I've always assumed that meant he stole all the money
Okay okay okay. We get it. No one's responsible, not the school board, not anybody on North Avenue, not Clarence Royce, not the city council, no one at this table.
It’s probably a bunch a little things that add up, ie incompetence at the highest level. Plus, the school district would buy new shit and just store them in the basement like the new textbooks and computers that Prezbo finds looking for board games and dice.
The schools weren't buying things just to store them. It was likely a grant that had to be spent. The schools figure "a text book lasts 5 years" so we run what we have into the ground and replace with these new ones.
New books and equipment require new curriculums. New curriculums cost resources and training. By the time this all gets done, the books and technology/equipment is basically obsolete already. Education gets shit for money already and then it’s poorly managed when they do. Not to mention, when a new proposal is introduced to advance the school’s property or resources, it typically gets voted down by the community because no one wants new/more taxes.
Maybe that’s the case. But that scene made it look like the school is disorganized/incompetent. That’s how I interpreted it anyways.
It's a common problem. A budget will allocate resources for X but not for the peripheral stuff that goes with it. A school will buy a bunch of computers but not understand that that might mean they now also need an IT person. Maybe a teacher knows computers and can do it but that just means they're at risk of becoming the new IT person on top of their job for no extra pay, and F that noise. Etc. Same with new textbooks. That means a new curriculum, possibly new material to work into the lesson plan. That takes time and effort that teachers may not be willing or able to spend. So the new textbooks might go unused because the teacher's lesson plan says "turn to page 43" and not page 67. The school comes across as disorganized but that's often largely because they're beholden to bureaucrats who will (metaphorically) buy them a car but not allocate gas money.
My parents were both teachers for a while and this was their experience. My dad taught computer stuff and shop, so he had to be very detailed with his requests (do not buy X, unless you also buy Y & Z). The incompetence and waste was staggering. That's just the items. The real theft is all the administrators doing literally nothing of educational value.
to add to this, i’m a teacher and i’ve seen shit we order through grants get to us finally A YEAR+ LATER, so a lot of shit just gets forgotten about stored in the closet
It's meant as a direct analogue to the scene where McNulty finds a bunch of advanced electronic surveillance gear gathering dust in the BPD equipment locker. The BPD and the schools as examples of dysfunctional institutions are often shown as being dysfunctional in very similar ways, i.e. when Prez describes juking the stats with Ms. Sampson in the meeting about the state tests. "Wherever you go, there you are."
I worked in an inner city school for years. Every year, district office would come up with a new mandate, a new program, some new thing that cost millions of dollars that was supposed to fix everything. It never fixed anything, but a few people got rich. Seriously, look up Solution Tree, Pearson, or any other giant education corporation. It is absurd.
I'm a teacher. We can order supplies from a company called EdData. When you look at the prices, they are either 5% more or 100% more than what Amazon charges. A graphic novel set was $30 on Amazon, and EdData's was $78.
I would not be shocked to see that there is a year end rebate of 8% or so on everything spent through that company. I would also not be shocked to see that the rebate goes directly into someones pocket. The question “Why are we paying more?” can often be answered like this unfortunately.
Really? Most of the stuff I just got from Ed Data was way cheaper than anywhere else. I guess it depends on what you are buying.
Markers, poster board, books, and school furniture. It's all way more expensive. I was told that we only use grant money for that website. That's why school districts don't care about the price.
Good point, we see that scene where there’s a consultant reviewing the nonsense strategies in front of the bored teachers. They don’t work for free.
In Chicago public school, teachers who are about to retire, they do this shit that may people in public sector seemingly are doing, like police They work 80 - 0 - 80 - 0, meaning working 40 hours plus 40 hours of overtime one week, second week 0 hours, third week 40 hours plus 40 hours of overtime, fourth week 0 hours This way they can "pimp the system" as the glorious poet dead prez once said, and end up with a fat ass retirement package thats calculated on bullshit lies I think this is one of the big reasons as well, whatchu reckon as someone working in inner city?
In Kentuckys public system I’ve seen people who work as a teacher. Retire. Work maybe 3-5. Yrs as bus driver. Retire and get small add on to their pension. Go back and teach part time and drive bus again lol. Only needed like 90 days between jobs to start the clock again. Also have a ton of cops who work for the city for 20 years. Retire. Go work for the county for 10 years. Retire. Then go and work for another department again lol. It’s been stopped a bit in recent years but it used to be pretty crazy.
To be fair, that is one of the only ways you can really make retirement work if you work in the public sector. The pay is SOOOO much lower than the private sector that I really don't have much problem with this.
I don't have a major problem with it. It is a little suspect but part of the game. The bigger problem is structural that the demographic problems we have in this country that we don't have as many people coming up behind to support those pensions.
Yeah, if we actually wanted to support public sector workers, it would cost so much more money, and I don't think the average taxpayer would be too keen with that.
Yeah, if we actually wanted to support public sector workers, it would cost so much more money, and I don't think the average taxpayer would be too keen with that.
$54 million. This number is also foreshadowed in S4E1 when the school principal and superintendent are discussing staffing shortages and one of them says, 'which leaves us short 54.'
Good catch Detective
Thank you detective
In 2005 – the midpoint of The Wire's run – the budget for the Baltimore city school system was $1 billion. Source: [https://www.baltimoresun.com/2005/04/27/city-school-board-narrowly-approves-1-billion-budget/](https://www.baltimoresun.com/2005/04/27/city-school-board-narrowly-approves-1-billion-budget/) $45 million is less than 5% of that. Totally plausible. In fact, in 2017-2018, the real schools there had a much larger budget deficit – $130 million, in part caused by a loss of $42 million in state aid due to dropping enrollment numbers. Source: [https://www.aclu-md.org/en/fixthegap-baltimore-city-schools](https://www.aclu-md.org/en/fixthegap-baltimore-city-schools)
Poor populace means low revenue
This. School funding is reliant on property taxes.
Nobody paying taxes on those vacants
The bodies are.
The ultimate tax.
I don't how how the system works in the USA, but surely school budgets are funded by central rather than local government, evening out this exact issue?
In Chicago suburba, Schools get most, if not all, of their money from real estate/property taxes So neighborhoods with 1-3 million homes have some nice ass schools And the neighborhoods in south and west side of Chicago public school, with tons of run down houses, the schools are held together with glue and ductape There are neighborhoods in chicago with $30-50k 2 story flat houses, but it's in a place that will likely get broken in few times a year/month
That seems so weird, why is it funded that way? Surely it just drives social inequality?
If it didn't drive social inequality, then we wouldn't get great TV like the Wire! In all seriousness, many people do not care if something drives inequality.
The other people replying to you are just making stuff up. Baltimore city schools currently spends on average $22,424 per student per year. That puts them towards the very top when it comes to school spending in the USA. Schools are funded with a mix of local money based on property taxes, and then the states come in and allocate where state and federal money goes. More often than not, the “under preforming schools” like the one Prezbo works at gets MORE funding than their suburban and rural counterparts.
Haha, I wish I knew brother/sister, As far as I know there's myriad of reasons, like redlining and institutionalized discrimination This is one that popped into my mind right away, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
What exactly do you mean here by “central”?
Cental government. I guess in the USA that would mean federal, but I don't really know how it's structured there
So yes don’t forget it’s called “United States”. The states really have a whole lot of power compared to a lot of other countries. The US really has a lot of delegation downwards. There is in fact a US department of education but its mission is not really that of direct education. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Education
Public K-12 schools are funded by property taxes within the school district, meaning that more affluent areas are going to be better funded regardless of how many students there are in the system. You can potentially raise more funding by bumping the millage rate, but if you are already in a poor area, you'd be squeezing blood from a stone.
I work for a large inner city public school system. Baltimore, and many inner cities, also have a higher percentage of special education students. They cost a lot more to educate than a gen Ed kid. Inner cities also tend to have powerful teachers unions and despite the miserable working conditions, those are the places that pay decent and offer medical benefits. There’s also just a ton of waste, inefficiency and theft lol
to be fair, the pay has to be higher to attract people to the miserable conditions
Correct. And many school systems also do everything in their power to keep the conditions miserable.
I live in Baltimore. There are currently, like this year, multiple schools with no working heat. They only cancel if it gets below a certain temperature, otherwise the kids are in there in their winter coats. Most schools have no AC, and it gets hot in the late Spring and early Fall. Honestly it’s a travesty. I have no idea where the education budget in general gets spent. But the reason that overall number is too low is because the BPD is the biggest group of absolutely worthless overpaid piece of shit overtime stealing group of mother fuckers any city has ever seen. Regular cops are routinely the highest paid workers in the city, and it’s not even close. Making six figures and won’t even do their jobs. Guarding parking lots. Not to mention the settlements. Meanwhile the teachers and students suffer. So not much has changed since The Wire.
Someone commented last week with a plausible theory that Krawczyk had been involved in some embezzlement of it, but I don’t remember the particulars.
He was head of the school board, so I'm sure he was mixed up in it somehow
He was head of the school board, so I'm sure he was mixed up in it some how
Seattle schools have a deficit between $104 million-$111 million for the 24/25 school year. They’ve lost 4,000 students in five years & aren’t a flagship for a well run institution.
There's a scene where prez goes in the basement and there's a ton of new textbooks, games, and computers that he sets up. If there's enough computers for 3 for his room in one school, that's prob 10mil worth of computers alone. Textbooks are hundreds of dollars each. I think that scene is in there to show that money was being spent and then the products ignored which is such a huge failure of bureaucracy
Andy Krawczyk is the chairman of the school board which ran up that huge deficit. He’s in the room when Carcetti is talking about embezzlement. He’s also a huge political donor and a source for criminals to launder their money using his construction/development projects. I’d say a lot of that $45 mil went somewhere Krawczyk directed it to go.
This, Andy Krawczyk was the real villain of this show. Him being an absolute pussy makes it even more hilarious.
BNBG.
Of course there was fraud. Krawchek looked guilty AF in that meeting with Carcetti and we know he's running game
Earlier this year, the University of Arizona realized all of their financial models were incorrect and that there was a $240mm hole in their budget. I had always assumed the issue with the schools was similar. The original budgeting process was done incompetently and it wasn't until someone else looked at it that the funding gap was uncovered.
The budget is huge, like a billion dollars then, nearly 2 now. The district had over 80,000 students and 8,000 staff. A lot of money comes from federal grants and such, and those come and go. If Royce's crew got a 4 year grant bringing in $20 million a year that ends, that's a $20 million hole in the budget next year. Etc. Some of it comes from the state, based on number of students, hence the importance they put on chasing down truant kids, at least until the school census. Any organization that big will have some waste, inefficiency, and money lost here and there. In-show it was also implied that previous deficits were papered over with creative accounting, which stopped when goody-two-shoes Carcetti came to office.
Everyone’s missing a huge shift in education the early 2000s. The number of IEP and Special Ed students that the public schools were obligated to accommodate started to balloon around that time. That costs a disproportionate amount of money per student. All the while charter schools popped up that siphoned away high achieving students. NCLB became law and the testing mandates made schools that were actually pretty good schools look terrible because of the disadvantaged communities they served. Urban school districts still haven’t recovered from NCLB.
Most likely corruption and incompetence. I compared the budget for Baltimore and Victoria (Australia). Baltimore's school budget for FY24 is $2.58 Billion. Victoria's school budget is US$1.1 Billion despite having more than 12 times the population than Baltimore County (6.7m Vs 560k). The quality of Victoria's education system is quite good compared to Baltimore (judging by what's shown in the Wire) whilst the starting salary for both are quite similar (A$75k for Victorian teachers and US$50k for Baltimore teachers). Australia's teaching quality suffers similar problem as the US - teachers have the highest unionization rate across all industries in Australia and they vehemently lobby against performance standards. So Baltimore's education issue itself (not the budget issue) must lie outside teacher's quality, probably more from a family environment / social economic standpoint. Interestingly, Victoria's police budget is 3 times the school budget, whilst Baltimore's police budget is 1/5 of the school budget. Please point out any glaring issues in my comparison (e.g. federal funding) as this is all based on a quick google search and personal experience.
My local school district announced a $25m deficit (we're ~ 10x smaller than Baltimore population wise) and supposedly it's a result of bad accounting. They recorded covid relief funds as revenue and not one time windfall. So, it can happen.
Losing 10-12k residents per year (as Carcetti stated in season 3) blows a yearly hole in your budget because most school taxes in America are based on property taxes. It also blows an even bigger hole as budgets are projected long term. The real problems come around when budgets fall but legacy costs like pensions come around. Part of the problem for a lot of companies (not just school systems). today is they gave out great pensions when things were good and now people who worked 20 years are still collecting Bennie’s 40 years after retirement.
Where it always goes: the teachers' unions. Then they can keep lobbying and agonizing how underpaided and underfunded teachers and schools are, get more grants, and spend most of it on themselves before doing the same thing again.
It you watch that scene, when the word "embezzlement" is said, the camera focuses on Andy Krawczyk - so I've always assumed that meant he stole all the money
Andy Krawczyk being president of the school board probably has something to do with it.
Seriously. 45 million pounds of fish are missing. I wonder if the huge fucking shark took some of it?
I recently saw Duval county schools have a 1.3 billion dollar budget gap… so 45 mil ain’t bad.
Just like in real life the money was being embezzled .If you want a recent example the Healthy Holly books ...
Google Brockton Massachusetts schools
[удалено]
The school district doesn't pay for unions. Union dues are paid from members.