I remember showing up for tenth grade, looking at the list of assigned classrooms in the first day of the school year. Instead of the usual the digit number, it said "C1". My classmates showed up, and we're just as confused as I was.
The C turned out to be short for "container", which we found in a corner of the school grounds.
That said, being able to quickly go outside in every break was pretty neat. And the school actually did get a second building only a few years later.
Welcome to government funding.
School District: we need a new school
Enrollment: 4200
Government: Awesome, here's $4.2 million, go build the 4200 student school.
SD: Uhh, won't that take a few years? Should we add some buffer space to the plan?
Government: ehh, naah
Spongebob 3 years later: Welcome to Springfield High School!
Enrollment: 6900
Springfield: see, gooberment, we needed more classrooms!
Gooberment: heh, would you look at that. Lol. Well, use your budget to build some portables.
SD: Us? Why don't you pay!?!?
Gooberment: Oh, haha, yeah, that's an operating expense. We only fund capital projects! Don't worry, give us a plan to expand and we can fund you in 10 years
10 years later: Ok gooberment, our numbers say we need 15 classrooms. But for the expansion, we should do 25 for future proofing
Gooberment: Oh, but you only need 15 now? Yeah here's money for 15
2 years later: Here's 15 classrooms!
SD: We need 25...
Gooberment: Oh, yeah, get some portables and talk to us in a few years!
Rinse and repeat
For anyone interested: This meme has been posted by bots to a Reddit community I was active in back then very often.
A bot would mirror these Reddit posts in a Discord server and because this exact meme has been posted there so often, it became an insider at some point, with various people always posting this meme again (because that was itself funny).That's why I can't take this meme seriously at all.
In our town, one of the schools was just built 5 years ago. They built it without classrooms. Not a single one. They had a gym, common areas, admin offices, IT infrastructure (office with a server room became the councillors office and the IT guy needs to ask permission to use it lol), bathrooms and library. They designed it so it could be made entirely with portables. From the onset.
Neighborhoods go through booms and busts of school age kids. These are actually a great solution to get through the boom, then you move them to the next booming neighborhood. Though the schools should be designed so they butt up against the main building and you can go down a hallway into them.
One school I went to has like a third the school with them, but they were down a hallway connected to the school. I didn't even realize they were portables until years later.
The most permanent solution is always a temporary solution
It just makes me happy that the ramp is compliant with regulations. I’ve seen some pretty shitty ramps.
My high school was given a $1.5 million check by some alumni who had some success after school and wanted to give back when I was a sophomore. It was supposed to be used for a new multipurpose room and chem lab.
They never did that and instead put it all into the football program. The school now, 21 years after graduation, looks the same as it did when I went except it has a huge ass security fence around campus, a couple more "temp" buildings and the gym is hella nice.
Good ole’ “portables”
We called them portables.
That happened when the school refused a number of students. The local politicians didn't like that and said the school was not allowed to refuse students anymore. When summer vacation came there were a few dozen more students signed in than they're were chairs in the school. The politicians had no choice but to do some expensive cabin building before school opened for the next year. After that, refusing new students was allowed.
My school had the library in a portable unit like that. The thing was ancient, and had barely any insulation and a leaky roof. In the winter months you could see your breath while reading a slightly damp feeling book.
It was eventually demolished, it was too unsound to be portable enough to move any more.
Decades are a temporal unit
Just checked my old elementary school, and surprisingly they're gone and what looks like new permanent buildings in another location! They were there as of 2 years ago, but now it's extra blacktop and and even more recently a solar panel array. It took about 3 decades but they finally did it.
The Terrapin block.
The ones at my school actually look like they've been torn down now (having lasted a good 50 years or so), and replaced with a whole new set of temporary buildings for future generations to marvel at.
My middle school had an entire wing built from these things. There was even an enclosed hallway with a carpeted plywood floor, and doors directly into the dozens of “temporary” rooms.
I didn’t realize it was such a trend. Somebody must have really been pushing those things for school districts that weren’t rich enough to just throw up a building.
These are incredibly useful. In Iceland we have mobile classrooms that can be moved by truck. If you need only one or two classrooms then these do the job but as soon as you get to 5 it justifies building a new wing of 10 classrooms. Incrementally building 1-2 classrooms is not the best use of public money.
Wait yalls had that many windows? These look nice. Ours looked like someone gutted a corrugated metal double wide and put a divider wall in the middle to make 2 "classrooms." There was 1 larger window on the backside, and 1 door in the front of each room.
You know something's afoot when those are signicantly better than the regular buildings.
Quick Look at my former HS and middle school via satellite imagery still shows the temp buildings exactly where they were when I was there. Looks like new roofing on them though. So 35 + years? And they were there for years before I attended.
Nothing more permanent than a temporary government installation.
Yup. Cooked in the summer, froze in the winter, leaked in the rain, they stuck half of my freshman classes out in those fuckers in tornado country.
They're still there.
Y'all had windows in yours? Fancy!
My 4th grade classroom looked exactly like this.
We had temporary dorms that were built in the 80s lol
They're still up at my school I believe
We had a couple trailers for lunch while they built the cafeteria.
They did get it done while I was there though.
Shout out to Southwestern College. My Community College in SoCal had these.
Pretty wealth district near us had a cubic shit load of these things.
Looked like the entire school was a "temporary" popup carnival.
Ah, Latin class.
I swear that's a shot of my English class in the 9th grade.
My first high school had 27 of them.
We called them bungalows, haven't seen them in years.
This one is really nice. Ours weren't ever that fancy.
Aka: My 6th grade classroom.
I only ever saw this in LA
North Carolina a few years ago tried to put in a policy limiting the number of students per teacher to something like 28. It was pointed out that not only can they not possibly hire enough teachers statewide to meet that demand, the United States also can't build enough of these trailers to meet the demand for classroom space that would require.
