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I've been in PTA fights over this and yelled at superintendents in multiple school district meetings now. The real answer of where the money is going? Contractors.
Everything is done by contractors now because it's easy to sever and it allows organizations to focus on one thing they're good at. Do you need janitorial staff or do you need to keep things clean? Well the answer is you need to keep things clean - so how? Just pay the contractors because the school board got bribed. Sure, it turns out the contractors cost 3x the cost of a dedicated janitorial staff in the long run, but they were quicker to set up and the board wanted a turnkey solution.
That's the approach that every school board uses to answer that question. Need X - ok well we don't want to hire anyone because that makes people mad about how we use money... so we'll spend MORE money on Y over the long run for something that will be a permanently reoccurring cost. Anyone go to a school cafeteria recently? Did you get food served on disposable styrofoam treys or were you given a melamine tray and plate with reusable utensils? Just kidding I know the answer to that already. Do we provide school supplies to students at the district level? No, every man for themselves go to walmart and pay $60 for school supplies for each child with all the markup instead of letting the district buy them by the pallet and distribute at the cost of wholesale for 15% the total price of everyone wastefully purchasing their own.
Don't forget that school boards are notoriously easy to corrupt. Usually it's something relatively benign like a board member has a family member that owns a company that does contract work and they were recommended to the rest of the board. But often it is outright bribes.
But this short sighted view of how to run things is making everything expensive in America. Everything has ten fucking middlemen between you and what you want. And they're all goddamn contractors now. Cheap in the immediate but far more expensive over time. Why? Because we aren't allowed to have honest conversations about government expenses anymore. We aren't allowed to ask for real services for our children because of the short term demands of the bottom line. And when we do open up those conversations, the calculus shows the quarterly expense of hiring a permanent employee is more than maintaining the contract even though that employee is cheaper at the 5 year mark. We aren't allowed to dig ourselves out once we're stuck in the pit bought by contracts.
Edit: To expand on the list of contractors that now handle (BADLY) the same work done by roles that were traditionally employees who gave a shit and were held to a standard of care and duty:
I've heard rumblings of replacing:
About the only jobs safe are the principals and teachers and the football coach and that is only true while unions exist.
A friend and I just had a conversation today about how using contractors instead of CalTrans crews to build CAHSR has probably meaningfully contributed to the cost overruns. There's one instance I'm aware of where a contractor submitted a cost overruns to the authority for reimbursement on THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS of long distance calls. In 2017. Motherfucker, use Skype, email somebody, God damn. But we both know that was a scam, and thankfully, so did the inspector general.
just do the same for:
And in a couple of decades, you can undo everything your parents worked for, pull the ladder up behind you, and leave your children a dystopian hellscape!
Sadly this isn't new, and hospitals are an example that comes to mind for me. At least one in particular. In 2007 there was a huge scandal about the treatment of US soldiers at Walter Reed, which was thought of as one of the top military hospitals. The initial reporting was from the Washington Post and largely focused on how the privatization of care and the contracting process itself had failed the patients so horribly.
I vaguely recall that building upkeep was delayed years because of contracting issues, and that the staff was slashed from hundreds (plural) to less than a hundred, claiming they couldn't find qualified candidates. There were complaints about rats, roaches, and black mold. I'm also fairly certain there was a story of one guy saying he was handed a shitty photocopy of the grounds and it took him hours walking around in a hospital gown to find his room. Two weeks later he found the person who was supposed to be running his case, and the case manager said they had no idea where the patient had been those two weeks.
Looking now, Wikipedia doesn't even mention privatization or contracting issues. The one (2010) complaint of this on the Talk page gets a reply saying "well the military was ultimately responsible for holding those contractors accountable," and it ends there. Not wrong, but still feels like it's not giving a full account of the story.
Obviously this is just conjecture now, but honestly the staffing part reminds me just like how, as I'm job hunting now, I notice companies keep posting the same ads, saying they can't find anyone who wants to work, while offering peanuts for very high requirements, and getting hundreds of applications. I'm sure lots of them aren't qualified, but I'm confident some of them are. I've even been offered significantly less than my last job paid, for a position (at a different employer) that would've been a manager for my previous level. I can only imagine how crazy it gets in the medical field.
Oh god this may be the most depressing social media comment I've ever read. Thanks for raising awareness
You nailed it