Hello everyone! So, this is not a normal post from me (you know… talking about West Ada). I have had great experiences with West Ada including the teachers, the staff, and all of the students. But, the infrastructure that powers all of it SUUUUUUKS! No, seriously. THE LARGEST district in the state can’t get they s**t together. So, I wanted to share a book a friend made for a class.
ON THE RECORD: I am not like SSSniperwolf, so she gave me full permission to use it and she would like to go by Ira Wren (that is her pen name). She worked really hard on this for a project, and she did a great job! THANK YOU! 🙂
So, let’s go through each part together and I will give some commentary about each problem.
PROBLEM 1: THE BUS
So, WASD uses CST (or Cascade Student Transportation) for their bussing needs. Now, according to one of my other friends, this was not a problem during the 2022-2023 school year. But, it now has become a problem, made even worse since I have to take the bus every morning. So, the problems began in the beginning of the year with our bus driver who picks us up in the morning from our community always being late. He would be scheduled to arrive at 6:30ish and he would not show up until 6:50ish, causing us to be late to school. This finally did end a month or two ago, but it was an annoyance for a long time. But, those were only on B days (they schedule 4 periods on one day and the other 4 the next day).
A days were (and still are as of writing this) weird for me because I go to a different school for two periods for CTE (or Career Technical Education) classes. To get there, I use WATS (the West Ada Transportation System) to get there and a shuttle (separate from WATS) also ran by CST and WASD. So, you might be asking “Are those bad too?”. Well, yes and no. The morning bus went well for a long time… until TODAY (yep, that is why I am writing this). It seems like CST is having a lot of turnover because it seems like our WATS driver quit. So, we had a sub who drove like a lunatic, almost ran me over while walking to my bus because he thought I was not there, and he almost missed kids at another stop due to them being inside the school were they were waiting so that they wouldn’t freeze to death. Yeah, NOT GOOD IF I HAD TO SAY SO MYSELF!!
My bus taking me back was great until our bus driver had to take off since she… got cancer.
**Side note: I am very sorry for her getting cancer and I hope she is doing better. Her being out is not her fault, and it is OK to be out for medical reasons.**
So, you would think that they would give us a sub bus driver. Well, sometimes they do, sometimes they strand us and we are waiting 20 minutes for a new bus to take us back.
But with that, that is it for problem 1. On to the next problem…
PROBLEM 2: THE COMPUTRERS AND BYOD
Now we are getting into something that I know way too much about. I will have to keep this as general as possible since I work for the district in their tech department. So, here we go.
The computers that they give us… suck! Shocker! They are the cheap bottom-of-the-barrel Pentium Silver based laptops that take forever to startup, have a bunch of bloatware, and block a lot of things… including portions of my website. Yeah, dumb.
As also seen in the picture, our computers are worse since they are not Chromebooks, but Windows laptops and we have to use Office and not Google Docs/Sheets/etc. Now, I prefer Office over Google’s offerings, but the computers that they give us really should be Chromebooks due to the processors being put in them. It is just very annoying to use them. And yeah, as the picture states, they send a bunch of useless emails that I just delete. Just… dumb.
Also, BYOD (or Bring Your Own Device) somewhat exists, but is generally NOT recommended. Personally, I would love BYOD to be a thing, but it is not and we are forced to use their own computers. Lovely…
On to problem 3…
PROBLEM 3: THE FOOD SITUATION
Yeah… I very much agree with this. Now, I don’t each school lunch (because it sucks) and I will just bring in my own or go out to a fast food place (see the correlation).
Also, as seen in the pictures, the food is expensive. Like, very. The economy sucks and we pay the price. By the way, I WILL BE ENDING IT THERE SINCE I DON’T NEED A POLITICAL DISCUSSION WHEN WE ARE TALKING ABOUT WEST ADA!!
But anyways, what can I tell you, that is how all school lunches are… they are cheap to get and they taste horrible. It is like a stereotype now. What can I say?
Finally, here is problem 4…
PROBLEM 4: FUNDING
Alright… we are at the last problem, which is funding. This is more about the condition of the school and not the departments since I really don’t know how they are doing. Ira Wren is in the Theater Department, so that is why it is mentioned here.
Funding will always suck when it comes to schools. OK, I will talk politics for a little bit. I live in Idaho, where it is very much Republican. A lot of the people moving here are from California, and they are also Republicans looking for a place where people believe what they believe with a cheap price tag associated with it. So, when a levy for the district went on the ballot, it almost passed, but it didn’t at the end. This is the problem with funding when it comes to schools.
Now, the state has Advanced Opportunities, which is one of the best things ever! It is allowing me to get my Associates Degree in High School while paying a lot less, and when I said a lot less, I meant it. It will cost me and my parents about $400 for all 60 credits. The rest is funded by the state. So yeah, amazing!
Now, back to West Ada. If it passed, it would of allowed the district to do renovations to schools that really needed it. But, now the schools will continue to get older with no attention to their condition due to funding.
SO, this is really not a problem with West Ada, but with the voter and taxpayers. Actually, that is the root of all of these problems.
Conclusion and My Reason for All of these Problems
Yeah, I am blaming the taxpayer and voters for all of these problems. Starting with the bus, there would be less turnover if WASD and CST could pay the drivers more. But, they can’t due to the lack of funding. Next, The computers could be upgraded, but the district does not want to spend that much on tech due to, you guessed it, funding. The food could be better if they had the funding.
Look, all of these problems are due to funding. So, let me say this: if you are a voter that lives in the WASD boundaries, when they put out a levy, vote YES! You will be helping people like me and my friends get a better education and school district in the process!
So with that, thank you guys for reading and have a great day! 😊
P.S. If you want to read the full book, here is a link to download it:
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