Visual Concepts for the School Budget Crisis

Visual 1: The Shrinking Slice - Three Pie Charts

Image Generation Prompt

Three pie charts side by side, labeled “Past,” “Present,” and “Future?” in a clean infographic style with a dark background. Each pie represents the total economic activity connected to a community like West Orange.

Past (left pie): A large bright green/teal slice dominates (~65%) labeled “Community & Schools” - this is money that stays local: teacher salaries spent at local businesses, school events, property values sustained by a great school system. A moderate blue slice (~20%) labeled “Necessary External Services” - textbooks, some specialized vendors, reasonable costs. A small red/orange slice (~15%) labeled “External Extraction” - manageable overhead flowing outward. The overall feeling is balanced, healthy, sustainable. A small label beneath: “A balance could be found. The school system thrived.”

Present (middle pie): The green/teal “Community & Schools” slice has shrunk noticeably (~40%). The activities within it are visually more crowded - tiny icons or text showing growing demands (special ed, enrichment, facilities, compliance) packed into a smaller space. The blue “Necessary External” slice is similar (~20%). The red/orange “External Extraction” slice has grown dramatically (~40%) - with labels like “Healthcare premiums,” “Insurance middlemen,” “Corporate vendors,” “Administrative overhead.” Arrows or visual cues showing money being siphoned outward. The feeling is strained, tipping. A small label beneath: “Costs siphoned away. The slice shrinks but demands grow.”

Future? (right pie): The green/teal slice is critically small (~25%) and visually cracked or fraying. Quality indicators are visibly declining - maybe icons crossed out or faded (teachers leaving, programs cut, buildings deteriorating). A small additional gray slice appears labeled “Families leaving” showing population/tax base erosion. The red/orange extraction slice is enormous (~50%+) and labeled with terms like “Private equity healthcare,” “Outsourced staffing agencies,” “Rent-seeking.” The blue slice remains but feels like a burden rather than a service. The overall feeling is collapse in progress. A label beneath: “System collapse. The talent leaves. What remains?”

Style: Clean modern infographic. Not cartoonish. Muted colors except the red/orange extraction slice which should feel alarming. Think data visualization meets editorial illustration.

Textual Description (for the site)

The Shrinking Slice

Imagine the total economic activity connected to our community as a pie.

Years ago, the community’s slice was large enough. Teacher salaries circulated locally. School events brought people together. Property values reflected a stellar school system - one that West Orange built a reputation on, especially in special education. We still relied on some external services (textbooks aren’t printed locally), but the balance worked. The board and union could argue about the details because the fundamentals were sound.

Today, that slice has shrunk while the demands within it have grown. Healthcare premiums have ballooned as private equity and insurance middlemen extract more and more from the system. Corporate vendors take their cut. Administrative overhead grows. The money that used to circulate locally is being siphoned outward - not because we’re spending more frivolously, but because the cost of everything the district depends on has been inflated by layers of rent-seeking that didn’t exist a generation ago.

Tomorrow, if nothing changes, the slice shrinks past the point of viability. Teachers leave because the pay can’t sustain a life here. Families leave because the schools can’t sustain their children. The tax base erodes. The extraction continues. What remains isn’t a school system - it’s a shell.

The board isn’t wrong that the numbers don’t work. The union isn’t wrong that the workers are being squeezed. They’re both looking at the same shrinking slice from different angles.

Visual 2: The West Orange Thought Experiment

Image Generation Prompt

A warm, slightly utopian illustration of a self-contained community (think a friendly small city in a glass dome or on an island - not dystopian, more like a cozy thought experiment). The community is visibly thriving: schools with engaged teachers and small class sizes, parents volunteering, teenagers coaching younger kids, community gardens, people building things together.

The key visual element: there are no dollar signs, no cash registers, no corporate logos. Instead, people are exchanging TIME - maybe visualized as small clock icons or hourglasses being shared between people. A teacher gives time to students; a parent gives time to the school garden; a teenager gives time coaching; an engineer gives time fixing the school’s technology. Everyone has enough because nobody is paying rent to an invisible landlord outside the frame.

Somewhere subtle but visible: a wall or boundary around the community, and beyond it a faded, grayed-out world of office buildings, corporate towers, and highways - representing the “world that is” that currently consumes everyone’s time and money. The people inside the community are looking inward, not outward.

Style: Warm, hopeful, slightly stylized. Think Studio Ghibli meets civic planning illustration. Not photo-realistic. Not corporate. Human-scaled.

Textual Description (for the site)

What If Nothing Existed Outside West Orange?

This is a thought experiment, not a proposal.

Imagine, for a moment, that West Orange was entirely self-contained. No state funding formula. No healthcare industry extracting billions. No corporate staffing agencies. No Lifetouch. No insurance brokers. Just the people who live here, the skills they have, and the children they’re raising.

In that world, would we have enough talented people to run a school system? Absolutely. This community is full of educators, healthcare workers, engineers, artists, coaches, administrators, and tradespeople. The talent isn’t missing.

Would we have enough time? That’s the real question. And the answer is: yes - if that time wasn’t already consumed by the need to earn enough money to survive in the world-that-is. The parent who could volunteer as a reading tutor is working a second job to cover healthcare premiums. The retired teacher who could mentor new staff is substitute teaching to supplement a pension that doesn’t keep up with inflation. The engineer who could build the district’s budget visualization tool is billing 50 hours a week for a company whose profits leave the state.

The constraint isn’t talent. It isn’t willingness. It’s that the economic system extracts so much from people’s time and money that there’s nothing left for the community they actually live in.

The community exoskeleton is a small step toward reclaiming some of that capacity - not by opting out of the economy, but by organizing the margins. The PTA parent who donates 5 hours a month. The sports league coach who volunteers weekends. The grant writer who spends evenings on applications. These are people giving time they barely have, because they care more about their neighbors’ kids than about the system that’s squeezing them.

If we could ever reduce the squeeze - through lower healthcare costs, less administrative overhead, smarter use of technology, community self-sufficiency - then more of that time comes back. More of the pie stays local. The slice grows again.

That’s the long game. The school board crisis is where it starts.

Further fleshing out the hypothetical

Imagine an absurd hypothetical where only West Orange exists, everything outside it has been dematerialized but the world still magically works. Money is also not a thing. Let us flesh out our hypothetical by climbing a simplified Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Physiological Needs

Shelter: West Orange still exists, so we have that, yay! Well, largely. There’s a bit of a Marvel-style Snap/Blip situation as not everybody that works in West Orange actually lives in West Orange, and vice versa. Plus the housing shortage is still real. But those are different fun challenges. Let’s imagine that it just works out somehow.
Food: Uh oh, I’m pretty sure we don’t have enough farms and the like in West Orange to feed the entire population. Again, yeah, maybe with enough creativity and vertical farming maybe but let us introduce the first exchange - we re-materialize just enough world outside to serve as a food producer, and now need to trade something constructive we do to cover the food. Let’s just imagine we provide some remote services that tie up a number of the population with “jobs”.
Power: Speaking of vertical farming, that would have taken a lot of power, and uh, again I’m not sure if we actually have any power plants in West Orange? Although we do have solar panels and batteries! That counts for something. We should probably still institute a bit more trade to get more power.

Draw The Rest Of The Owl

We’re going to jump from two circles to a largely drawn owl representing the base things we need in West Orange. Now, let’s build a school district, which somewhat spans levels 2-4 of Maslow’s hierarchy depending on what you’re looking at.

Textbooks: We need to get textbooks to students. We could have a local printing press, but that’s not very efficient. So we trade with the outside world to get textbooks. This probably goes back to the earlier note on the pie slice diagram - after all they’re just textbooks, who’d ever run a business on increasingly jacking up prices with barely-changing volumes that are required for each new year? Hah, that’d never happen!

Except, of course, it did. Textbook prices have risen 1,041% from 1977 to 2015 - three times the rate of inflation. Each new “edition” adds 12% to the price. Publishers keep 65% of what’s paid. The content barely changes. The price always does.

In our time-economy, a textbook is: a knowledgeable person spends some time writing, someone prints it, kids read it. That’s… not expensive.
Teachers: We probably need some of these, right? How much can a teacher cost anyway - you feed them, clothe them, and get them some textbooks. Maybe some crayons? Things were simpler in the past-pie. Wait - healthcare? What’s that? Oh, yeah, booboos and such, the kids get those too. That can’t be very expensive in the time economy, how many teachers can one doctor patch up on average?
Healthcare: Yeah okay, I guess this gets a bit more complicated when the big ticket items come into play. Cancer is no joke, even if this hypothetical reads a bit humorously. A local doctor could handle the basics pretty easily, and most supplies weren’t too hard to get - scissors are just scissors, right? Who would add absurd markups just to tag something as “medical grade”?

Hang on a tick - something went off the rails there. The local doctor was fine for local things that made sense. Ordering in simple supplies made sense. Who introduced that whacky markup on medical supplies?

Here are some real examples:

Saline bags - literally salt water - cost about $1 to manufacture. Hospitals have charged $546 for six liters. Some have published prices as high as $26,667 for a single bag.

Tylenol - one hospital charged $1.50 per tablet. You can buy 100 tablets for $1.49 on Amazon. That’s a 10,000% markup.

EpiPens cost about $30 to manufacture (including the drug, the injector, R&D, and royalties). The retail price rose to over $600. The epinephrine itself costs about $1.

Needles - Humana charged patients $143.25 for needles it bought for 80 cents. That’s a 17,806% markup.

Hospital Tylenol - this one is the purest example. The acetaminophen tablet a nurse hands you in a hospital bed is the exact same pill you buy at CVS. Same manufacturer, same dosage, same molecule. Hospitals charge $15-25 per individual pill. You can buy a bottle of 100 for $1.49. The product didn’t change. The building did.

Similarly, a single aspirin in a hospital can cost $25 - and at one hospital, four tablets cost nearly $200.

This isn’t even a “medical grade vs. consumer grade” distinction. It’s literally the same product in a different context with a 10,000% markup. If someone did this with food we’d call it price gouging. In healthcare we call it the chargemaster.

And then there’s the broader pattern of “same thing, different label, different price” that extends well beyond medicine:

Brand-name drugs vs. generics - when Lyrica’s patent expired, its price plunged from $7 per capsule to $0.13. Same molecule, same dosage, same effect. The $6.87 difference was paying for a brand name, not a medicine.

Printer ink costs $12,000+ per gallon - sustained by the razor-and-blades model where the printer is sold at a loss and the ink recoups it at astronomical markups. The liquid itself is not that expensive to produce.

The human tendency to accept price based on context rather than content is what makes all of these markups possible. A pill is cheap at CVS and expensive in a hospital. Ink is cheap in a factory and expensive in a cartridge. A drug is cheap after the patent expires and expensive the day before. The product doesn’t change. The story around it does.

In the time-economy: a doctor examines a patient with a reusable tool, administers salt water, and gives them a common pain reliever. That’s an hour of skilled work and some basic supplies. In the real economy, the same encounter generates thousands of dollars flowing to manufacturers, distributors, insurers, billing companies, and hospital systems - each adding a layer of cost that has nothing to do with the actual healing.

More things the school district needs (that got weirdly expensive)

Transportation: West Orange has roads. Kids need to get to school. A bus is a bus. In the time-economy, someone drives it for a few hours each day. In the real economy, transportation is one of the larger line items in a school budget - involving vendor contracts, fuel costs that fluctuate with global oil markets, procurement processes for the vehicles themselves, and layers of insurance and compliance. At our April 20 board meeting, a parent described an incident where their child was effectively lost on a vendor-managed bus route. In the time-economy, your neighbor drives your kid to school. In the real economy, a multinational fuel market and a procurement chain stand between your child and the building down the road.
Building maintenance: A school needs a new roof. In the time-economy: some skilled tradespeople spend a few weeks, the community supplies materials. In the real economy: a bidding process, contractor markups, insurance requirements, bonding requirements, prevailing wage laws, inspections, and by the time it’s done the roof cost 5x what the materials and labor actually required. Each layer existed to solve a real problem once, but collectively they’ve become the problem.
The cafeteria: Kids need lunch. In the time-economy, some parents cook, others grow food, someone coordinates. In the real economy: a food service contract with Aramark or Sodexo, processed food shipped from industrial facilities, USDA compliance paperwork, and somehow a school lunch costs more than the ingredients of a home-cooked meal while being nutritionally worse. The overhead IS the product.
Technology: Kids need computers. In the time-economy, the community’s engineers set up and maintain devices. In the real economy: a Chromebook purchasing contract, a Google Workspace licensing agreement, an IT services contract, a content filtering vendor, a student information system vendor, and a cybersecurity audit firm. The child types on the same keyboard either way.

The Pattern

The activity hasn’t changed. Teaching is still teaching. Feeding is still feeding. Healing is still healing. Driving is still driving. What’s changed is the number of intermediaries extracting value from each transaction.

In the time-economy thought experiment, you strip those away and suddenly the math works again - because the actual work was never the expensive part.

The Fix: Split Implementation & Solution

Globalize solutions, localize implementations

The initial vision for a community coordination platform involved something that could list and work out solutions in the abstract. There are only so many distinct ways to run a permitting process, and probably similarly not that many different ways to produce a textbook. The content of the textbook will of course vary, but the design and production process? Not so much.

The trouble happens when profit enters the picture. A good professional can write a textbook to distribute in a local community with a certain investment of time - both in developing the content and printing it. No money involved in our hypothetical world. Entirely doable within the West Orange bubble, so long as we have the professionals (and we have plenty!).

When an entity hellbent on maximizing profit has a monopoly on the production of textbooks, however, that’s when things go bad. Say a local professional wrote a textbook on a topic already covered by a monopolist company - different content, but same topic. It fundamentally isn’t hard. So why doesn’t that happen more, particularly in a supposedly capitalistic society where competition is meant to “fix” such situations?

The barriers are well-documented:

Adoption lock-in: Districts adopt textbooks in multi-year cycles through state-approved lists. A locally-written textbook, no matter how good, isn’t on the approved list. Getting on the list requires years of lobbying and review. The publishers who already have lobbyists win by default.
Bundled ecosystems: Modern textbooks come with online portals, test banks, lesson plans, and LMS integrations. A teacher can’t just swap in a better book - the whole ecosystem has to change. This is the same vendor lock-in strategy that enterprise software uses.
Lawfare and IP: Publishers aggressively protect their market position. Even when content is factual and non-copyrightable, the specific arrangement, problem sets, and presentation can be litigated. The cost of defending against a Pearson lawsuit exceeds the cost of just buying the textbook.
Liability culture: If a district uses the “standard” textbook and a student underperforms, the district followed best practice. If the district uses a locally-written alternative and a student underperforms, the district “experimented on children.” The incentive is to buy the expensive option because it’s the defensible option.
The new edition treadmill: Publishers release new editions with 12% price increases and trivial changes (reordered chapters, updated cover photos), then discontinue the old edition’s online resources. Districts are forced to “upgrade” not because the content improved but because the support was pulled.

What if the backend process was globalized?

Here’s the thought experiment within the thought experiment:

What if every possible approach to teaching a subject was documented as an open, freely available “recipe” - not the textbook itself, but the pattern for creating one? A curriculum framework, a set of learning objectives, a template for exercises, and a guide for local adaptation?

Then any community with qualified professionals (and West Orange has them) could produce its own materials - adapted to local context, reviewed by local educators, printed or distributed digitally at local cost. The “solution” is global (the curriculum pattern); the “implementation” is local (the actual book, written by people who know these students).

This is how open source software works. Linux isn’t one product - it’s a pattern that thousands of organizations implement locally, adapted to their needs. The kernel is global; the deployment is local. Nobody pays a monopolist for permission to run a server.

This same split applies to nearly everything the school district buys:

Domain	Globalized Solution	Localized Implementation
Textbooks	Open curriculum frameworks, creative commons content	Local educators adapt and print for their students
Healthcare	Best-practice treatment protocols, generic drug formulas	Local providers deliver care at local cost
School photography	Open-source photo management platform	Parent volunteers run picture day for their school
Budgeting	Open budget visualization tools, shared financial models	Community members build their district’s dashboard
Governance	Open process templates for public meetings, proposals	Local boards adopt and adapt to their context
Maintenance	Volunteer coordination frameworks, scheduling tools	Neighbors sign up to care for their kids’ schools

In each case, the knowledge of how to do the thing well is shareable and should be free. The doing of the thing is inherently local and costs real time from real people. The dysfunction happens when intermediaries insert themselves between the knowledge and the doing, extracting rent from both sides.

Why this hasn’t happened yet

The honest answer: coordination is hard, and until recently the tools didn’t exist to make it practical. Writing an open textbook is one thing. Getting it reviewed, adopted, distributed, supported, and updated by a community of volunteers requires infrastructure that didn’t exist at the right price point.

That’s changing. The same tools that let one person build a 20-module whitepaper in a few days could help a community maintain open curriculum materials, coordinate volunteer services, and manage transparent finances. The overhead of coordination is collapsing. The question is whether institutions can adapt fast enough to take advantage of it, or whether they’ll keep paying monopolist prices because “that’s how we’ve always done it.”

The school board crisis is where this tension is most visible - and most urgent. But the pattern is everywhere.