Yeah, we called them "Portables." They were there long before I came, and will be there long after I am dead. Long live our plywood fortresses.

I remember showing up for tenth grade, looking at the list of assigned classrooms in the first day of the school year. Instead of the usual the digit number, it said "C1". My classmates showed up, and we're just as confused as I was.

The C turned out to be short for "container", which we found in a corner of the school grounds.

That said, being able to quickly go outside in every break was pretty neat. And the school actually did get a second building only a few years later.

Walking through the snow in the Canadian winter from your warm school hallway to the portable for that one class was always torture.

Welcome to government funding.

School District: we need a new school

Enrollment: 4200

Government: Awesome, here's $4.2 million, go build the 4200 student school.

SD: Uhh, won't that take a few years? Should we add some buffer space to the plan?

Government: ehh, naah

Spongebob 3 years later: Welcome to Springfield High School!

Enrollment: 6900

Springfield: see, gooberment, we needed more classrooms!

Gooberment: heh, would you look at that. Lol. Well, use your budget to build some portables.

SD: Us? Why don't you pay!?!?

Gooberment: Oh, haha, yeah, that's an operating expense. We only fund capital projects! Don't worry, give us a plan to expand and we can fund you in 10 years

10 years later: Ok gooberment, our numbers say we need 15 classrooms. But for the expansion, we should do 25 for future proofing

Gooberment: Oh, but you only need 15 now? Yeah here's money for 15

2 years later: Here's 15 classrooms!

SD: We need 25...

Gooberment: Oh, yeah, get some portables and talk to us in a few years!

Rinse and repeat

For anyone interested: This meme has been posted by bots to a Reddit community I was active in back then very often.
A bot would mirror these Reddit posts in a Discord server and because this exact meme has been posted there so often, it became an insider at some point, with various people always posting this meme again (because that was itself funny).

That's why I can't take this meme seriously at all.

In our town, one of the schools was just built 5 years ago. They built it without classrooms. Not a single one. They had a gym, common areas, admin offices, IT infrastructure (office with a server room became the councillors office and the IT guy needs to ask permission to use it lol), bathrooms and library. They designed it so it could be made entirely with portables. From the onset.

Hell the house I live in was also made to be temporary, for factory workers almos 100 years ago

The most permanent solution is always a temporary solution

Neighborhoods go through booms and busts of school age kids. These are actually a great solution to get through the boom, then you move them to the next booming neighborhood. Though the schools should be designed so they butt up against the main building and you can go down a hallway into them.

One school I went to has like a third the school with them, but they were down a hallway connected to the school. I didn't even realize they were portables until years later.

Didn't yall call them "portables"? At one of my first public schools, they had a big long installation called a "portapac".

Might be a Canadian thing judging from some of the comments.

I remember they had air conditioning when the rest of the school didn't.

Does anybody remember the way the floors had a springiness to them and how they squeaked and creaked as you walked across them?

How about the mental kind of threshold-looking strip in the middle of the floor from wall to wall where I believe they had connected two halves together, if I recall?

It just makes me happy that the ramp is compliant with regulations. I’ve seen some pretty shitty ramps.

Good ole’ “portables”

My high school was given a $1.5 million check by some alumni who had some success after school and wanted to give back when I was a sophomore. It was supposed to be used for a new multipurpose room and chem lab.

They never did that and instead put it all into the football program. The school now, 21 years after graduation, looks the same as it did when I went except it has a huge ass security fence around campus, a couple more "temp" buildings and the gym is hella nice.

Ah yes, the "portables" that never moved. They're still at my old school, decades after I've left they're still in the same damn spots.

We called them portables.

That happened when the school refused a number of students. The local politicians didn't like that and said the school was not allowed to refuse students anymore. When summer vacation came there were a few dozen more students signed in than they're were chairs in the school. The politicians had no choice but to do some expensive cabin building before school opened for the next year. After that, refusing new students was allowed.

There's a saying in programming, which I believe applies in most disciplines, that "a temporary solution is a permanent one"; also written as, "no solution is more permanent than a temporary one."

In Norwegian we have this (little known) word 'permasorium', describing the everlasting provisions like these.

We actually liked them when my elementary school was being renovated a million years ago when I was a child because they had AC and the old unrenovated buildings didn’t

Had to go check my elementary school on street view... Yup, still there since 30 years ago. Painted at least!

Decades are a temporal unit

My school had the library in a portable unit like that. The thing was ancient, and had barely any insulation and a leaky roof. In the winter months you could see your breath while reading a slightly damp feeling book.

It was eventually demolished, it was too unsound to be portable enough to move any more.

I thought these were temporary in that they last several decades, not several years. Permanent school buildings are intended for several generations.

we called them demountables.

they where never demounted.

I remember having to still walk out to those even though the DC sniper shot a kid at a school a few miles away.

Public schooling has gotten so strange over the last 2 decades. All these trailers, teachers begging for supplies. Would be surprised if there was some group that was trying to error public education. Is there a benefit to keeping a group of people uneducated?

Just checked my old elementary school, and surprisingly they're gone and what looks like new permanent buildings in another location! They were there as of 2 years ago, but now it's extra blacktop and and even more recently a solar panel array. It took about 3 decades but they finally did it.

The Terrapin block.

The ones at my school actually look like they've been torn down now (having lasted a good 50 years or so), and replaced with a whole new set of temporary buildings for future generations to marvel at.

My middle school had an entire wing built from these things. There was even an enclosed hallway with a carpeted plywood floor, and doors directly into the dozens of “temporary” rooms.

I didn’t realize it was such a trend. Somebody must have really been pushing those things for school districts that weren’t rich enough to just throw up a building.

These are incredibly useful. In Iceland we have mobile classrooms that can be moved by truck. If you need only one or two classrooms then these do the job but as soon as you get to 5 it justifies building a new wing of 10 classrooms. Incrementally building 1-2 classrooms is not the best use of public money.

I was taught grade 4 in one of those

ahh yes the "portables"

Wait yalls had that many windows? These look nice. Ours looked like someone gutted a corrugated metal double wide and put a divider wall in the middle to make 2 "classrooms." There was 1 larger window on the backside, and 1 door in the front of each room.

You know something's afoot when those are signicantly better than the regular buildings.