• 32 Posts
  • 377 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
  • Seigest@lemmy.caOPtoOntario@lemmy.ca•Got my bribe check from Doug today. I took the advice of some users here and put it to better use.English
    4·
    4 days ago

    I’m the system admin of a non profit myself. Honestly there’s a lot more we can do to cut cost. But theres a cost in cutting cost.

    For example. Sometime prior to COVID, and prior to me working there, my organization needed a “common digital service” (being purposely vague here for privacy). In order to build oversight reports to our ministry we needed a separate reporting service so the ministry could get the data they wanted in order to keep paying us. We also then needed a third service to store all the data since the other 2 didn’t want to do that part.

    So our “Common digital service” was now composed of 3 systems. Issues grew pretty quickly after the initial set up. Despite these systems being “partners” every time an issue came up they’d endlessly blame each other and refuse to fix the cause of the issue. They would offer to correct the data for a fee. Since we were legally mandated to maintain the data they’d often pay the fees. It was like these big companies came along, and collaborated a scheme to extort money out of this non profit. No one there was tech savvy enough to notice.

    When I came there I figured this out. Mostly because I was previously employed at one of the companies involved. Legal action wasn’t an option. But I found a company that does all three parts of the system. They can’t do the blame loop thing and they were way cheaper overall. Easy fix right? Nope.

    As a non profit we are required to hire a third party requisition organization. The process of even getting the new system contract took well over a year. This is required so non profits don’t just take bribes and such.

    Then comes migration. The slow process of taking data from system A and putting it on system B. They used very different structures so it was a lot of manual work for a small team. We can’t just hire new people or even temp staff so it’s tonnes of overtime.

    So consider all the extra cost in this story, things moved way slower, extra services had to be hired, overtime had to be paid. It is a lot of bureaucratic stuff that private companies don’t have to deal with. But that extra cost is the cost of preventing corruption. The only way we could fix the broken system was to get a huge initial investment from the ministry to fix things.

    I’m saying I agree or disagree with this but that’s how things work. And if an organization is dependent on donations alone it’s probably got a lot of overhead like this. Things they cant fix untill they can afford to fix them.

  • Seigest@lemmy.catoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Special ed kids, what's it like?English
    1·
    12 days ago

    I was in elementary in Canada early 90’s. My school was weird. There’s a large Mennonite community in the area where I grew up so a large percentage (more than 50%) of the kids in this school were Mennonite. For those unfamiliar, these are similar to Amish. Such farmers with strong religious views, most of them were “old order” meaning they grew up in homes with little to no electricity. They also finish school at age 12 regardless of progress. This meant that they were exempt from a lot of the classes my tiny public school had to offer. No French, computing, or Sex Ed. A lot of them were also in special Ed. I’m not going to sugar coat this. It’s forbidden from them to marry outside of their culture and only like 4 families came to the area. So there’s a lot of disabilities as a result of inbreeding with that community.

    All this to say that my school had absolutely no clue how to deal with my undiagnosed autism. But they seemed to have decent funding due to the much higher needs.

    I was in special Ed via French exemption status. This means I never learned french. I’d instead be placed in a room with all the Mennonite kids often in a corner trying to read. Eventually I was put into some kind of program. A neurologist should come by and do experiments on me. Nothing weird, just testing my fine motor skills. They (falsely) diagnosed me with “elementary tremors” a pediatric doctor upped this to a “retardation caused by mild down syndrome” (extremely wrong) after years of that nonsense they decided to use this crazy new fangled technology to give me a leg up with writing. I was given a Macintosh computer. I had a desk with tiny wheels and my 4th grade self had to wheel this from class to class (including “portables”). Of course this was pretty obsolete tech even for its time. My parents got me an Alpha Smart which was way better. By 6th grade I had a personal support worker to help get me caught up. I failed grades 3-6 but was ‘placed’ into the next grade anyway and never made to repeat anything.

    Highschool was very different, no Mennonite, so way less funding. It was still a French exemption class but there were only about 5 other students in the class. It seemed to be less about education, or assessment of my condition. It was some watching videos and doing some analysis. It was mostly just a time to catch up on homework. Often there wasn’t even a teacher present.