The Los Angeles Unified
School District (LAUSD)
for giving away 640,000 ipads
- FREE - using taxpayer money
From allgov.com ...
" ... By next year, all 640,000 Los Angeles Unified School District students, K-12, would have free iPads and software to facilitate their education. The district had indicated that it preferred that students not take the machines home, but left that decision to individual principals.
The district is spending $500 million in bond money for the computers and another $500 million on wi-fi and incidentals. LAUSD belatedly decided to spend another $38 million on keyboards when the iPad’s virtual keyboard was found to be unsuitable for the rigors of school work."
Stu Pitt says, WTF? $1 billion of taxpayer money to give LAUSD students FREE ipads? Why? Students will no doubt hack their free ipads (they already have, according to the article) and will then be able to freely email each other, take videos and post them to YouTube, listen to iTunes, watch online porn, play computer games, and spend time on Facebook.
Free ipads for hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles students? Brilliant. Free ipads, that, in reality, costs $500 million taxpayer dollars and $500 million worth of bonds that residents will have to pay interest on.
Our government in action.
Update to the story
As I was scanning the news stories today I learned that each free ipad will cost taxpayers $700. $700? WTF? Kinda high, isn't it? What, the school district couldn't negotiate a lower price, a volume discount, on a purchase of a whopping 640,000 ipads?
Where are they buying the 640,000 ipads, at BestBuy? I imagine the conversation would go something like this:
sales person: "Welcome to BestBuy."
customer: "Yeah, hello. I'm from LAUSD and I want to buy 640,000 ipads".
sales person: "Really? Huh. 640,000 ipads? We sell them for $700 each. That's the retail price."
customer: "OK. That's fine. I don't care, it's not our money, it's the taxpayer's, so I'll pay the retail price - on all 640,000 of them".
sales person: "OK. That comes to $448 million. Will that be cash or credit card?"
JHC, who the f--k is the purchasing agent for LAUSD? Whoever it is, fire him/her!
Another perfect example of our government in action.
Update to the update
From myfoxla.com ...
"First reports that LAUSD students hacked into iPads and used them to go online for purposes other than school. Now, we're learning there are 71 iPads missing.
We're talking about iPads paid for with tax payer money. Currently, the district is handing out iPads worth $700 each.
The school district doesn't know what happened to the 71 iPads but they are investigating. "At this point they're lost or missing ...
1200 iPads were handed out last year, at the end of the school year 71 did not make it back. Despite that LAUSD handed out another 14,000 iPads last month ..."
Stu Pitt says, 71 missing ipads? That's $50,000 of taxpayer's money. Lost. Missing. Gone. And yet LAUSD went ahead last month and handed out another fourteen THOUSAND (14,000) free ipads!?
Who's running the show at LAUSD, and making all these decisions and spending all this taxpayer money, a 12-year-old?
LAUSD. Educating 640,000 children.
Yeah, that works. NOT.
Congratulations LAUSD, for creating a billion-dollar ipad scandal with taxpayer dollars, you deservedly earned this week's Stu Pitt Award!
