I had some that looked exactly like this

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.
- For me it was containers like these:
  Long live our tin fortresses
  
  At least you had windows. My kids are in a pretty new school building, but most of the classrooms are located in the middle of the building without windows and natural light. Seems like another one of those "only in America" things.
  
  What's with the cable at the top between sections?
- Demountables for us
  
  Did you go to Summer Heights High?
- I'm pretty sure ours was asbestos.. back in the 80s.
- I'm pretty sure ours are still there 23 years later.
- Portables
  Yup, that's what I was told they were called.
- I was searching the thread to see if everyone called them that or if it was regional.

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.
- I went to school in Aurora in the 90s but didn’t have to suffer any of these containers. Moved to Virginia and had a bunch of classes in them

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
- was really confused how spongebob fit into this story for awhile
- Happened to me except the plan was the school to expand the number of grades in the school year after year to prevent pulling kids out of their current schools
  And they built it to be at capacity day 1

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.
- Why the hell are you taking a meme seriously in the first place. You see it, laugh if it resonates and move on.
  
  laugh if it resonates
  That's what I mean with taking it seriously. You see it and its contents genuinely as the joke it displays.
  In our group, it just became a meta-level-joke because we've seen it so often by spam bots and the joke was to re-post it as the newest most original joke one has ever thought of (but without it mattering what's actually on the image); and that was funny.
  
  But reposts trigger me beyond belief! I feel bad downloading them even though we're on a completely different platform. I can't control my emotions though so I just had to justify my feelings to everyone otherwise I'd feel bad.
- I'm online quite a bit, so really surprised I haven't seen this one before
- So the meme itself is as moldy as the portables? Fitting.

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.
- They designed it so it could be made entirely with portables.
  wtf....
  
  Right? To be fair, they used some of the nicest portables I've ever seen. Two portables to a class, windows, a semi permanent foundation, plumbing, HVAC hookup, networking, the works. I had to install WAPs in the drop tile, and it was not the worst thing I've had to do there.
- My charter school operated similarly to this. In a sense it's kinda smart on dwindling budgets. If the portables are decent enough it allows the school to rearrange or expand without massive construction/demolition costs.
  In the end most classrooms don't need a whole lot, right?
  Speculation, of course. Just for once I hope there's not some evil cynical reason behind the way things are done lol .

Hell the house I live in was also made to be temporary, for factory workers almos 100 years ago
- You're temporary.
  
  Sometimes when I consider how literally everything is temporary, it does help me set my priorities and let go of some things.
  
  I wish all the plastic shit I'll leave behind me for thousands of years would be more temporary too 😩

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.
- Here in socal we called them portables.
  
  NorCal as well
  
  Same in NM
- Yar
- In the south east we called them trailers.
- My elementary school in Utah, we also called them portables. Ah the memories!

I remember they had air conditioning when the rest of the school didn't.
- Ours didn't (in the 1980s). They were hot in summer
  
  My school in the 80's only had AC in the main office.

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?
- I remember that. Along with the distinct smell they all had, the scent of whatever the portable materials were used.
  And because of the compact size, all the sound has this sort of reverb to it. It's not really an echo, just an elevated hum of busy noise, with only the higher pitched ticking current going through the fluorescents.
  And how that size also affected the lighting. Somehow even with the florescents it all was oddly sepia toned, no doubt because the only colors on the inside were white, grey, tan, and beige...

The most permanent solution is always a temporary solution

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

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.
- I just checked my old elementary school online. Nearly 40 years later, the same temporary buildings I had class in are still there.
  
  "Nearly forty years ago? This person must be old," I thought. Then I did the math on how long I've been out of school. Oof. Sorry for judging your age, fellow millennial.

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.

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."
- "there's no solution so permanent as a temporary one that works"

In Norwegian we have this (little known) word 'permasorium', describing the everlasting provisions like these.
- I like it! In German we call temporary solutions a "Provisorium" and often say that they stay for ever (Nichts hält länger als ein Provisorium). I like the idea of making a permanent Provisorium into a single word!

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
- They were cold as fuck at my school. The AC worked like a charm
- Yeah, I had one for third grade, and since we weren’t near any drinking fountains, we got our own water cooler, which the other classes were jealous of! That place was like our little apartment, I loved it.

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.
- Ah yes let us keep books made of paper in a damp leaky building. What could possibly go wrong

Had to go check my elementary school on street view... Yup, still there since 30 years ago. Painted at least!
- One time I shoved a crayon in the lock on one of these hoping class would be cancelled.
  Instead we had to stand outside until the custodian showed up and fixed it.
  
  How many revolutionary acts go

Decades are a temporal unit

I thought these were temporary in that they last several decades, not several years. Permanent school buildings are intended for several generations.
- I think they're called temporary because they have no foundation; if you wanted to, you could easily remove the building.

we called them demountables.
they where never demounted.
- We called them portables.
  My grade 3 portable is still standing. My children have been taught in it.

I remember having to still walk out to those even though the DC sniper shot a kid at a school a few miles away.
- Bowie High representing! Was walking to the same temporaries when the shooting at Tasker occurred. Small world...
  
  I went to Roosevelt but had lots of friends from Bowie. My one friend lived right across the street from tasker.

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.

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?
- uneducated people are easier to exploit
- Yes, they will buy Apple phones. That is to say, fall head-first into consumerism.
- They were using those trailers back in 1985, but they weren't calling them temporary, it was just the only way they could afford to add classrooms instead of cramming more students in. I was even sitting in one of those watching the space shuttle failed launch on a tv on a cart with a vcr on the lower shelf.

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.

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.

ahh yes the "portables"
- in aus they were called demountables. but i never saw a single one demounted. the ones at my old primary school are still there 30 years later.

I was taught grade 4 in one of those
- Those are rookie numbers...I did grade 4 twice in one of those
- They had these in Canada too?
  
  Absolutely. They pitched them as a way to expand space cheaply so they could save money to build a new school. We were told that our grad class of 05 would be either the last in the old school or the first in the new one.
  It's still the old one.

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.

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.
- What you point out makes sense, but I can't stop thinking of a classroom that's being moved as students are taking class in it 🤣 would be fun when I was a student, also it's pretty dangerous (but still fun)

Quick Look at my former HS and middle school via satellite imagery still shows the temp buildings exactly where they were when I was there. Looks like new roofing on them though. So 35 + years? And they were there for years before I attended.

Nothing more permanent than a temporary government installation.

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

Yup. Cooked in the summer, froze in the winter, leaked in the rain, they stuck half of my freshman classes out in those fuckers in tornado country.

My kid goes to a very good school in a nice neighborhood. They just added several of those trailers last year.
- Idk why we don't just build 2 story schools but I'm not an architect
  
  A lot of laws (in the States at least) require the capacity to be only what the current student enrollment numbers are at, or at what the enrollment numbers are projected to be when the building is built. This is why you almost always see brand new schools completely full within a few years of being built if they have any sort of normal growth AND why these types of mobile buildings get built. They just don't have any room whatsoever for the student growth. Some schools have started opting for "modular" buildings after the fact to get around this. They're basically permanent buildings but the building is designed so that it can accommodate just about any size room, whether it's offices, classrooms, small gyms, etc.. This allows for the building to be built and ready to go but also not require that it not be an "empty" room so they can kinda sorta have spare classrooms when needed.
  
  money mostly. It's cheaper to do this than it is to build a whole ass new permanent building. Sometimes it's also faster. My highschool (loooong time ago) was planning basically a rolling teardown of the entire campus to rebuild everything like 4X bigger, and to accommodate that they covered a parking lot with these things for the better part of a decade, as they had to wait for summer to do the major "not safe with kids around" construction every year.

My 4th grade classroom looked exactly like this.

Y'all had windows in yours? Fancy!

They're still there.

We had temporary dorms that were built in the 80s lol

They're still up at my school I believe

Shout out to Southwestern College. My Community College in SoCal had these.

Needs more jpeg
- Nah it's about the right amount for the nostalgia

We had a couple trailers for lunch while they built the cafeteria.
They did get it done while I was there though.

Ah, Latin class.

My first high school had 27 of them.

Drove by the other day, they replaced them with more perminent, but still prefab buildings.
- mine still has the og 90's units and even installed more. and from google earth, the main complex appears to be rotting lol