Tell you what. At least the ones I’d used were damn well built. The absolute beating those things took and withstood. Paint got chipped was about it. Maybe the arm drooped a bit from those days’ big kids.
This is tangentially related, as the Twitter thread focuses exclusively on seating, but if you're interested in the designers and companies that have shaped school and other aspects of children's lives, I highly recommend "The Design of Childhood" by Alexandra Lange. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/design-of-childhood-9781632866...
I was working across the street from the high school today, and was watching some kids race down the street in office chairs. But they weren't cheap Costco ones, they were metal and obviously from the school. I was thinking that they must be really well made.
Schools absolutely burn cash on furniture these days. Even when I was in high school it was bad. School administrators went to an apple store and had to buy those expensive huge solid wood tables they had for the common areas, which people promptly defaced in a few years. Wooden lockers too in the new wing, but they had those crappy cabinet hinges that tend to pop off with typical usage, so half the lockers would end up crooked and apathetic kids would slam them anyhow and legitimately damage the door at that point.
This probably varies widely by state and even county/district. My NYC public schools had hard plastic everything; the only non-plastic surfaces were sheet-metal lockers and soapstone lab counters. And I went to a well-funded school with lots of extra alumni cash.
Schools burn cash in a “it’s expensive to be poor” kind of way. The desks in the schools I worked in were practically consumable, only lasting a couple of years before needing to be replaced. It’s impressive in a frustrating way: manufacturers have finally figured out the exact minimum amount of material and exactly how shoddy and few the welds can be to produce a desk and still be able to sell them. There is absolutely no bracing so sitting on them bends everything out of tolerance until a weld fails or the 4 legs are splayed out flat against the floor.
The school I help at has these metal chairs with plastic inserts for the final inch of the leg. One leg will regularly snap off enough that they cut the rest of them off at the wood shop and put them back in the classroom, it's kinda funny seeing like half the chairs being a inch too short.
