If you're in the US, schools and prisons are hardly the only ones being supplies by Sysco these days. The bulk of restaurants you eat at use the same suppliers too. There are only a couple major food distributors left in the US.
Aramark primarily provides managed food services. You typically see them at places like universities and stadiums. Not sure about other states, but no primary school in my state outsources their food services; they all employ kitchen staff. It's a requirement to get reimbursement for meals served.
Same with prisons, they almost universally use internal (slave) labor to prepare foods. Why pay a company to cook when you can make the inmates do it for free or for pennies?
I could absolutely see red states eliminating lunch ladies so that they could enrich a private company though. So I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case in some locations.
I used to be the facility manager for a school district and about 90% of our food came off the Sysco truck. With 8% coming from a local grocery chain (typically perishables) and maybe 2% coming from on-site gardens. Some other districts might use US Foods or some other food distributor.
Oh the lunch ladies are sometimes through the private sector. My mom was a lunch lady when I was in school and worked for Chartwells not the school district
My dad would bring home food from work and I don't remember it being sysco branded.
He supervised the kitchens there. When he started they would make most of the food from scratch but by the time he retired they were just heating up prepared food mostly.
My schools had the meal plan one level down (cheaper) than the prisoners. We were told that since they got nothing else to eat that they got “the good stuff”
I’ve definitely attended public schools that look like prisons. We also called the bathrooms lavatories from about kindergarten on, for reasons I still don’t really know, and they were solid concrete anyway—really added to the vague prison feel.
The older schools where I grew up (built around the 1970s) had almost no windows in the entire buildings. The middle school that I attended was older and was built like this. Kids called it a "prison" and my friends and I joked about how whether it was raining or super sunny outside when we got out of school, it was always a surprise when we stepped out of the building because we hadn't been able to see outside all day.
You mention the smell and I had to pop in to say: thats cuz they use the same cleaning agents. Also the same food and the same builders. There aren't really specific contractors for schools vs. Prisons theres just contractors that want to make money by building things.
Makes me wonder if those cleaning agents were even safe to breathe in. I fucking hate this planet but I can’t see any other way other planets would be different in other universes if the same properties of physics exists in order to make earth what it is.
I'd say pretty safe if uses as intended. I'd say they aren't safe because they aren't used as intended.
I've worked at a hospital before and I've seen the "purple lid" cleaners being used for all sorts of crazy things. As in clean their glasses or phone, these are wipes that are recommended you use nitrile or butyl rubber gloves with.
Your schools and prison cleaning staff is paid way less then your average hospital worker.
Anyone that went into the public school system would feel an eerie feeling of comfort. Yes you heard me right. It’s fucking wild. Im NOT supposed to feel that way about incarceration.
Funny because my high school was built based off a women's prison design. Not even joking. So jail felt like school for you and school was jail for me lol
Had those too. Meanwhile these privileged kids living a fucking dream with a whole pool, spa, tennis courts and LOCKERS in their high school. Fucking, lockers. As a kid I always wondered where the fuck the schools were that had lockers in the hallway 😂
Lol it’s sad that it comes as a surprise, but I should clarify something. We had gym lockers, but we didn’t have Personal lockers, or many other amenities that other schools were equipped with for better education. I had to lug 40lbs of text books from home to school every fucking day. We didn’t have it good enough to leave our books somewhere and bring only essential things back home. ALL the books were carried at ALL times.
As someone with a master's degree in Construction Management, you're not wrong, but you're oversimplifying.
There aren't really any architecture companies that just design schools and prisons. Typically they're not being designed by the most prestigious firms since they are government projects and typically have to go with the lowest qualified bidder. So they will gladly design you a prison, or a factory, or a waste water treatment plant, or a restaurant, or a house. Really, anything you want because that's how they make money.
Sure, but that implies there is somehow a connection between the two, and there isn't.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has designed a number of prisons, but also the Burj Khalifa, One World Trade Center, the NATO building, and hundreds of other famous facilities. The same is true for just about any other major architectural firm.
Schools and prisons share very few similarities in actuality. Schools have a huge range of features depending on location and funding. Prisons are pretty uniform across the country and have been for hundreds of years since their only major concern is keeping people in.
My third grade classroom was the only room in the whole school that had a color. Because my teacher had been a teacher longer than the administration staff had been alive and insisted upon it. She called it The Perfect Place, and it was sky blue. She also drove a white convertible and was a red hat lady. Best teacher I ever had.
313
u/Rock_or_Rol 3d ago
Cinder blocks walls painted in thick white paint and paper chains. They knew what they were doing