That’s why it’s smart for schools to carefully select their priorities, and be careful about unnecessary spending.

A good example is the Fremont Unified School District. In 2017, district officials were surprised to learn that state funding for the next fiscal year might be a lot less than what they counted on, leaving the district in a potentially frightening financial pinch.

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“The Fremont Unified School District faces a $23 million budget shortfall for the 2017-18 school year, largely because it plans to hire 48 more teachers, increase contributions to employees’ pension plans and cover negotiated salary raises, all while receiving less state money than expected,” the East Bay Times reported.

“Fremont school officials had projected that the district would receive about $267 more per student in the new school year beginning July 1 than it did the previous year from the state. But if (Gov. Jerry) Brown’s budget proposal holds true, the district will receive only $76 more per student. That amounts to a $6.3 million drop in anticipated funding for the upcoming school year.”

That type of financial surprise from the state is a norm in education. So why do schools continue to spend so much money on unnecessary things?

One example in the Fremont district has obviously been travel spending.

Between July 2016 and June 2017, the Fremont district ran up a $302,206.91 total tab in travel expenses with 491 transactions, for an average of about $615 per transaction.

More than one-third of that total – $107,144.35 – was spent on 104 charges at hotels around the state and nation, while another $69,584.09 was spent on airlines.

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The hotel tab included $33,419.50 in 16 transactions at various Hyatts, $17,649.81 in 14 transactions at various Doubletrees, and $9,225.41 in 19 transactions at various Hiltons.

The district spent $9,929.70 in six transactions in August in early September 2016 at the Palacio Del Rio on San Antonio.

There were also several large single hotel transactions, including $2,666.52 at the Marriott in Anaheim, $2,279.84 at the Intercontinental in Boston, $1,923 at the Indigo Hotel on Los Angeles, and $1,596.50 at Disney Resorts.

With so much funding uncertainty from year-to-year, it would be interesting to hear school officials defend this type of spending.