Montreal City Weblog

Kate 09:53 on 2023-09-11 Permalink Reply  

• Blork 10:10 on 2023-09-11 Permalink

  I once had a ceiling collapse on me in a restaurant!

• Ephraim 10:25 on 2023-09-11 Permalink

  Maybe we need to look at WHY the schools aren’t doing the maintenance required to their buildings and if need be, set up a crown corporation to own the buildings and charge them “rent” for the usage that includes maintenance. It’s been clear for quite a while that the school boards mismanage building maintenance. It’s like trusting a drunk to guard your bottle of vodka. At some point, you have to accept that maybe you shouldn’t be trusting them. How many buildings need to fall into disrepair before we stop trusting them?

• Kevin 11:00 on 2023-09-11 Permalink

  Eliminating the CSDM on paper can’t make up for decades of that board’s no-maintenance culture.

• Kate 11:21 on 2023-09-11 Permalink

  As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, the grade school in this neighbourhood got into such bad shape they demolished and rebuilt it, as they’ve done with several older school buildings in town.

  Admittedly, there are some good reasons to have a new building. We have different ideas now about universal accessibility, for example. Providing better air filtering (this school is a little too close to the Met), cabling for internet use, genderless bathrooms and other modern needs has to be easier in a new building than retrofitted into an old one.

  Still, I wonder how well these new buildings are being maintained now they’re up. Is everyone kind of thinking “Well, that’s done for another couple of generations!” and putting the need for maintenance down the memory hole?

• dhomas 12:17 on 2023-09-11 Permalink

  Without naming any school/school boards, I can see many inefficiencies from the school board my wife works for. The two most glaring ones:
  1) they pay for redundant services. They have both Google services as well as Microsoft services. For example, they have access to near unlimited Microsoft OneDrive storage AND Google Drive storage. Do they need both? This is pure duplication of services (and costs!).
  2) They installed costly air quality systems but not anything to change the air quality. In this example, they installed a LoRaWAN air quality sensor in every classroom. It monitors temperature, humidity, and CO2 levels. This is great and all, but it works on a very specified type of network (LoRaWAN) which needs to be installed and managed (presumably, by an external contractor with a monthly cost). It’s not just simple wifi. The sensors themselves cost about 400$. This does not include the backend network and management costs. During the latest heatwave, the school board refused to buy fans or AC units, on the basis of cost and this despite calls to the CNESST. They actually said to some teachers “you didn’t have air conditioning when you were in school”, as if climate change wasn’t a thing and we didn’t just break heat records.

  So much waste. And it’s not even like they’re doing it as part of a corruption scheme (as far as I can tell). It’s just mismanagement.

• Ephraim 18:40 on 2023-09-11 Permalink

  Which is sort of why I was thinking that having the building as a service might be more effective. I mean, they networked the rooms in the schools… but do you really think they used Plenum cabling?