Even as the Toronto District School Board was complaining about school funding changes, board officials were going ahead with a contract to spend more than $5 million buying new high-end iPhone handsets.

The contract proposal was only cancelled last Thursday.

That was after the school board had already talked about laying off teachers and warned that classes would have to be cut.

There was no money we were told.

Turns out Premier Doug Ford was right and the board could find savings elsewhere.

Let me be clear, the contract proposal I am about to describe could only happen in government.

According to a copy of the request for proposals (RFP) sent to companies looking to bid, the board wanted a whole new wireless contract for voice, data and text services complete with the new handsets.

The RFP showed the board was looking to purchase more than 4,000 brand new iPhones for administrators, the vast majority of them the high-end iPhone XS or XS Max valued at as much as $1,519 per handset.

In total, it called for 810 iPhone 8 models and 3,255 iPhone XS or XS Max. The total value for the handsets alone would have been between $5.1 and $5.6 million.

That doesn’t include the cost of the monthly bills for each phone or the many accessories requested.

The board disputes the $5.1 to $5.6 million figure, even though the numbers came straight out of their own document. Saying they can’t reveal why, the board claims they would pay a quarter of that price.

There are still several problems with this, starting with the need to go with top-of-the-line iPhones.

Google makes top-end phones that retail for less than $1,000 while Samsung offers phones that can handle corporate e-mail systems from $400 per handset and up.

While the board still needs to sign a new contract with a mobile phone provider by December, it says that given the fiscal situation, plans call for purchasing officials to “look to include a larger variety of phones at different price points.”

That’s a good move, but one that only happened because the board was told to start watching the pennies and to spend on what matters.

If the Wynne spending levels had stayed the same, then the TDSB would be wasting who knows how much on a new cell plan.

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