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.

Public schooling has gotten so strange over the last 2 decades. All these trailers, teachers begging for supplies. Would be surprised if there was some group that was trying to error public education. Is there a benefit to keeping a group of people uneducated?

ahh yes the "portables"

Yeah, we called them "Portables." They were there long before I came, and will be there long after I am dead. Long live our plywood fortresses.

Nothing more permanent than a temporary government installation.

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.

Decades are a temporal unit

Ah yes, the "portables" that never moved. They're still at my old school, decades after I've left they're still in the same damn spots.

In Norwegian we have this (little known) word 'permasorium', describing the everlasting provisions like these.

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

My 4th grade classroom looked exactly like this.

Walking through the snow in the Canadian winter from your warm school hallway to the portable for that one class was always torture.

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.

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.

Had to go check my elementary school on street view... Yup, still there since 30 years ago. Painted at least!

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.

Didn't yall call them "portables"? At one of my first public schools, they had a big long installation called a "portapac".

Might be a Canadian thing judging from some of the comments.

I only ever saw this in LA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItCToQSSdhQ

We actually liked them when my elementary school was being renovated a million years ago when I was a child because they had AC and the old unrenovated buildings didn’t