THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 20, 1995 TAG: 9510190165
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Beth Bergman
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
Former school Superintendent Sid Faucette and School Board member Ulysses Van Spiva used to go 'round and 'round on the subject: How many custodians are required by and employed in the school system? Is hiring individual custodians or contracting with a janitorial service the better way to go?
Their rounds generated far more heat than light.
Faucette's critics wondered whether his motive for contracting with the janitorial firm Serv-ice-Mas-ter was more connected to winning ServiceMaster's annual award for national superintendent of the year than to saving money from privatizing janitorial services. Faucette's method - abruptly making a pilot program an all-schools policy - didn't help.
Spiva's critics wondered whether his concern was less getting the best custodial work done at the least cost than preserving jobs for custodians.
Faucette has gone to Georgia. The '95-'96 school budget has gone into the same deficit mode as the '94-'95 budget (and maybe '93-'94). And (see the Kaleidoscope below) the Virginia Beach Education Association is generating heat for more money for schools, particularly for custodial services.
This is not altruism, and needn't be. Hundreds of custodians, you will recall, were added to the membership rolls of the VBEA along about the time Faucette was pushing privatization. Custodians no doubt felt the association could help them.
The association no doubt felt that expanding its membership among school employees would help it. VBEA members must meet a certain percentage of school employees to qualify for meet-and-confer negotiating status with the city; the more delighted customers it has in the city, the more clout it has with the city.
Yet the rationale given by the VBEA and reprinted below raises many more questions than it answers. For example:
The VBEA laments ``a 75% reduction'' in the budgeted amount for substitute custodians as an outcome of ``the budget crisis.'' There's no gainsaying the schools' budget crisis. But might there be a reason other than budget bungling for reducing the sum al-lo-cat-ed to substitute custodians?
The actual expense in '93-'94 was $442,188. In '94-'95, $158,239 was budgeted for substitutes; $594,237 was spent. But was much of that money spent because the school system abruptly canceled the ServiceMaster contract mid-school-year, at great cost, and had to scramble for janitorial services?
Can school-hired custodians do the job at a cost closer to a privatized contract?
As for money for custodian substitutes: Call it downsizing or rightsizing, expectations of productivity are higher now than ever before in just about every job. Co-workers in the private sector pick up the slack constantly for sick or absent colleagues. And schools are not, after all, a jobs program.
The accusation that a governing body is ``balancing the budget on the backs of'' whatever special interest the accuser chooses is popular among special-interest groups. But it is seldom constructive or fully informative. School year '94-'95 was a weird year for Virginia Beach, for janitorial services as for most other school expenses. For that reason and others, '95-'96 - which starts off a reported $400,000 short for custodian overtime - should be a year for more heat than light.
Before the School Board goes to City Council demanding more money for custodial and other school expenses, it ought to request and get an objective analysis: What custodial services do schools require? And how many custodians are required to meet them? by CNB