Do you mean in the sense of each department individually, or the school as a whole? I’m well acquainted with the idea of organizational waste-spending, but it feels like it should be possible for a school to overspend in much better ways—books for the library, field trips, materials for classes, hell, even bonuses like movie tickets or some shit for honor roll students at the end of the year if you’re not opposed to motivating in that way. Anything but “dump it into terrible food that we throw out.”

Basically, I’m asking: are school budgets so regimented that the money is essentially illiquid?