Schools wasting money is not as big of a deal as it is made out to be here. Not every investment can be a good one and you have to deal with that and just keep investing. My business partner used to say that innovation in the education field is like driving a van full of money to a school building and setting it on fire. Soit.
The main issue here is that a purchase like this (hardware firewalls!) fits in the rampant fear based culture around digital technology here where schools have their own IT (which they can’t deploy or manage) and everything needs to be absolutely secure. The net result of that way of thinking is of course that nothing is even slightly secure.