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How's that going for ya?
Quite well actually - the school he was hired onto apparently has plans to make him assistant department head next year. (He's hoping that comes with a pay raise.) He's the first full-time education faculty member that they were able to hire at the branch campus he works at (thanks to stimulus funding and increased enrollment), and they've been inordinately pleased with his work. Plus he's doing what he loves (most of the time) which is teaching.
The manufacturing sector is still drained dry, but the stimulus gave a critical boost to education throughout the US. Everything from new teachers to new appliances in schools (some schools had been using the same boilers or food service equipment for 50+ years) to funding for new textbooks. Locally, we were able to fund a lot of these things on our own with SPLOST, but some projects that were slated for years down the road were able to be moved up with stimulus funding instead.
People complain that putting money into school systems is "wasting" it, but they don't stop to think that the $2000 for a new dishwasher system in an elementary school means that 1. the company that made the system sold a product and 2. contractors were hired to install it and made money for their business. Most contractors are independent, small business owners in their own right, so they're the biggest recipients of stimulus money for building infrastructure projects. And they're glad for the work, since the housing market is still flatlined.
