I have seen this first hand. The hand selected parent study groups are geared to make the proposal sound good. The same for city bond elections. Another gimmick is using a local real estate broker and some architect/engineer to push the proposals. Cities are as bad as school districts. In fact they are worse because they have poorly qualified staff.

Most of us grew up going to school in basic structures with functional amenities. The people who put these bonds together give us a binary choice "for the children" to vote up or down on unique architectural marvels of glass and steel that far outclass the need. They act like they're playing with house money and it does them good to have them put in check from time to time.

I'd rather my ISD would give a quality education in trailer classrooms than an indoctrination / grooming in pseudo-luxury.

I was at a school construction meeting and they discussed the new middle school that was going in and how it was going to have "NO PORTABLES." The whole room started cheering. I was boggled that people even care about that, but then I realized it's part of justifying these wild pricetags. Overbuild the hell out of it and demonize portables. It was really distasteful.