Basic Trope: An underfunded, poorly-performing, poorly-maintained school.
- Straight: Troperville Public Schools have crumbling walls, falling-apart textbooks that have been in use since The '80s, overcrowded classrooms full of overstimulated kids, underpaid teachers (gross amounts of asshole-ery optional) and gross school lunches. The playground equipment is old and rusty. Teen Pregnancy is rampant, as are drugs and gangs, so many students don't even graduate High School.
- Exaggerated:
- The building has completely collapsed, and so classes are held outdoors even in the worst weather. The school doesn't even serve lunches, and the textbooks are the ones from The '50s. And not only are the teachers underpaid, they aren't even paid at all; they're either volunteers, or college students/recent graduates doing an unpaid internship. The playground equipment is not only rusty and old, it's crumbling and falling apart. Many students don't even graduate Junior High, because they get pregnant and/or get mixed up with drugs and gangs.
- Boarding School of Horrors
- Downplayed: The textbooks are from the Turn of the Millennium, and the teachers could probably be paid more.
- Justified:
- Tropestan funds its public schools primarily through property taxes. Troperville is one of those towns where property values aren't all that high for whatever reason(s), and/or where there are far more renters than homeowners.
- Westville is becoming, if it hasn't already become, a ghost town… the penny pinchers at the Tropestan Department of Education see no reason to keep Westville Elementary afloat under such conditions.
- The school exists only to teach children the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, because that's all they're going to need if they're going to be working in mines or factories, or becoming housewives.
- Funding for schools in Tropestan is dependent on the students' collective/average scores on standardized tests. For one reason or another, the students aren't doing so well on them, and so less funding is given to a "failing" school. It also doesn't help that the teachers are now forced to "teach to the test"- that is, teach students how to take the test, and what they'll need to know for the test, rather than teaching anything useful, and thus many teachers are burned out and jaded.
- The work is set Just Before the End: civilization is falling apart before everyone's eyes, and the education system only exists as a formality to cling onto whatever's left of their past lives. Both teachers and students are too concerned about their survival - if even that - to focus on education.
- The local Mayor Pain is deliberately withholding funding from public schools so that parents will be forced to send their kids to the expensive private schools if they want a proper education. The owners of said private schools are major donors to the Mayor, of course.
- Inverted: Troperville Public Schools have newly-renovated and well-maintained buildings complete with a Mysterious Teacher's Lounge for the faculty and staff, and beautifully manicured gardens. All of the teachers have excellent pay and benefits, the school lunches are made with only fresh, high-quality, organic, farm-to-table ingredients, the textbooks are updated every year, and the playground is newly built. Drugs, gangs, and teen pregnancy are very few and far-between, and almost all the students graduate.
- Subverted: Troperville Public Schools seem to be doing all right.
- Double Subverted: The textbooks are old and falling apart, and the teachers have a High Turnover Rate because of the low pay.
- Parodied: The school board gives the school an F--.
- Zig Zagged: The portrayal of Troperville Public Schools alternates Depending on the Writer
- Averted:
- No one goes to school in this setting.
- Everyone is homeschooled.
- The school is average.
- Enforced:
- The author is appealing to the childish hatred of school.
- The author did not have a good time in school.
- The work is intended to address the problems with a particular place's education system.
- This is a Save Our Students plot: the school needs to suck in order for the story to work.
- Lampshaded: "My school is a terrible place to be."
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: The heroes recruit kids from this school, knowing that they will find dissatisfied students wanting to be taken away.
- Defied: When the school starts to go downhill, the school board intervenes and increases funding and staff to prevent things from deteriorating. All deficient teachers are also given a warning and the Sadist Teacher is fired outright.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed :
- After some news goes around regarding the school's dysfunctional programming, it's promptly shut down.
- The school environment becomes so hostile that it leads to a tragedy, which in turn attracts the attention of news outlets. Their culture is condemned by the global village, and they become saddled with a reputation that haunts them for years to come.
- Reconstructed :
- The city fails to address the core issues that plagued the former school, and so they persist in the new campus they intend to replace it with.
- Their unsalvageable reputation puts the school across a collective Despair Event Horizon: why bother improving themselves if the rest of the world won't allow them to move past that tragedy? As a result, it continues to languish indefinitely.
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