I wasn’t clear - the buildings were retrofitted with multipane windows, new doors, insulation, all that stuff. Switching to geothermal was secondary.
While the buildings might be marginally more comfortable and energy-efficient, the massive expense did not make them as comfortable as truly modern buildings. So my conclusion is that it’s good money after bad to try and fix up old, inefficient buildings unless there are historical reasons to do so.
Build new ones. Cheaper and better in the long run.
My STBX owned a house in a small town in California where, for a time, electricity was provided by the town and paid for by property taxes. The result was lavish houses with electric heat and next to no insulation or weather-sealing… and I’m talking the late 1960s, not the 1920s. Retrofitting these houses to bring them almost to modern efficiency was staggeringly expensive.
I graduated high school 33 years ago, and perhaps fifteen years after I graduated, the building was almost totally rebuilt. At that point, it was forty or fifty years old, and not in compliance with various standards, handicapped accessibility in particular. I remember that the newspaper articles said the way the federal government funding was provided, the overall cost to the local residents was lowest for a demolish and rebuild rather than a retrofit.
In my state there is a separate budget for salaries from the one for buildings and equipment. It’s against state law to use capital outlay funds for teacher salaries or vice versa. So saving money on utilities will free up money for equipment, but not for salaries.
I can only speak to what I’ve seen, and when schools start cutting costs, laying of teachers and shutting down classes in niche areas seems to be one of the first places to start because it has less impact on obligate services and the consequences (reduced educational services and lower test scores) are not seen until later.
Regardless of this tangent, the savings from energy efficiency improvements, even if they could be done at no cost, would not go directly into teacher salaries or hiring more teachers, and retrofitting old buildings for energy efficiency is costly and rarely worthwhile without a massive rebuild. One of the oldest buildings at my undergraduate school (that I worked in for several years) was renovated a few years ago for both energy efficiency and to meet ADA and sesmic zone requirements, which basically consisted of almost completely gutting the interior (all non-structural walls), removing all steam plumbing, replacing all of the classic glazed single pane casement windows with non-opening or sliding double pane windows, and adding airlock doors, high R value insulation and exterior vapor barriers, commerical ductwork with zoned thermostat controls, corner and pedestal reinforcements, et cetera. They basically build a new building inside of the old historic building at a cost that exceeded the cost of another new building that was constructed just a few years before with three times the floor space. And it probably still isn’t as energy efficient as the newer building owing to the high ceilings and poor natural convection. On the other hand, it is an attractive Gothic Victorian edifice that has been a hallmark of the school since almost its inception, and the new building is an anonymous plain red brick that nobody will remember or care about. But in terms of saving money, it makes far more sense to build new with efficiency designed in than the expense of renovation.
Wages are usually the largest single component of a budget. I think they make up about 40% of the GDP right now–they have been declining. In labour-heavy sectors, such as education and policing and libraries, 3 areas I know a little about, wages more typically make up 85-95% of the budget.
It can be very difficult to determine good and bad teaching. I have reviewed a lot of university teaching evaluations, and teachers who make get low overall scores also have a significant number of students who “click” with that prof and report s/he is the best in the entire university. And of course other posters are right to say the firing of teachers, or any unionized worker, is not difficult: it simply needs to be done by the book.
If you Google William Baumol, you can find his recent obit in the NYT and elsewhere and get a very brief introduction to the Baumol cost disease, an explanation of why costs for services usually rise more than the prices of goods.
Brief version: you could make your local hair stylists a lot more productive by giving them weedwackers, but you probably aren’t going to like the result. It takes as long today to do someone’s hair as it did 20, 30, 100 years ago, while it costs less to make a weedwacker. But you can’t expect people to become hair stylists if you pay them the going rate from 1916.
Baumol was not concerned by the rising costs of services. He was, however, worried that governments would not understand the issue and so would slash public services and make life worse for people to save money.
One effect of that is precisely to treat teachers as if they were dispensable and fungible–if teaching is mostly about crowd control, droning at a captive audience, and giving standardized Scantron tests, then you need fewer teachers and can shop around for the cheapest ones.
If you Google William Baumol, you can find his recent obit in the NYT and elsewhere and get a very brief introduction to the Baumol cost disease, an explanation of why costs for services usually rise more than the prices of goods.
Brief version: you could make your local hair stylists a lot more productive by giving them weedwackers, but you probably aren’t going to like the result. It takes as long today to do someone’s hair as it did 20, 30, 100 years ago, while it costs less to make a weedwacker. But you can’t expect people to become hair stylists if you pay them the going rate from 1916.
Baumol was not concerned by the rising costs of services. He was, however, worried that governments would not understand the issue and so would slash public services and make life worse for people to save money.
One effect of that is precisely to treat teachers as if they were dispensable and fungible–if teaching is mostly about crowd control, droning at a captive audience, and giving standardized Scantron tests, then you need fewer teachers and can shop around for the cheapest ones.
Little of that is true, however, other than the standardized test situation. Where I live, at least, student-teacher ratios have fallen over the years. There are more teachers and more building area per student, resulting in a much higher cost per student (inflation adjusted).
And teacher pay has significantly exceeded both inflation and wage increases for all professions. And teacher salaries are set and standardized within each school district, so there is no shopping around for new teachers who will accept less money.