Custodial contract gets board scrutiny

PALMER — The school board has decided how much money it is willing to spend on janitorial services, a decision that could have implications for whether the work is done in-house or through a contractor.

The board passed its budget Wednesday. Having already deliberated the budget over numerous prior meetings, the only real tweak the board made was to make it more likely that the district will fund baseball programs at area high schools.

Most of the debate for the night, though, centered around the janitorial services contract. NANA Management has been doing janitorial work at the district since the work was outsourced in the spring of 2006

Last month, the board voted to only extend the company’s contract for 90 days. At Wednesday’s meeting it was clear that NANA had rejected that 90-day offer.

More to the point, it was made abundantly clear that the company’s offer to do the contract for this coming fiscal year for $5.4 million was a better deal than the school district could get doing the job in-house.

Henry Cottle, the district’s maintenance director, came to the meeting with a proposal to do the work in-house for that same $5.4 million.

“I tried to keep as many folks in the building as I could,” Cottle said. “I tried to be as creative as I could.”

But, he said, the pay and benefits he had to give the custodians, plus equipment and training costs to bring the services back to the district, meant that across the board area schools would have to see a reduction in janitorial staff to make that $5.4 million mark.

Elementary schools would have a split-shift janitor during the day. That janitor would work to open the school in the morning, make sure the heat was on and the snow was plowed, then go home and return in the afternoon. That sort of position, he testified, is very hard to keep staffed. As for supervision, the day shift janitors would report to the principal. Night janitors would have two supervisors.

“These custodial reductions are deep and will have to happen,” Cottle said.

Then there’s the question of equipment. Cottle said NANA is willing to sell the district back everything it bought from the district when it got the contract, for the nominal price of $1. But that doesn’t mean the district is out of the woods on that question. There are some things NANA bought on its own as the contract wore on, especially to outfit the new schools the district has built since 2006.

The bottom line, it appeared, was that to do the same job NANA was doing, the district would have to spend $7.1 million.

Board member Colleen Hamblin said, “$5.4 million is what we had budgeted and to do more than that would be to cost a position elsewhere. I’m not willing to trade a teacher for a custodian.”

The NANA contract has been an issue, with residents testifying at school board meetings that they believed the company didn’t do background checks, that the quality of people it hired didn’t compare to the quality of people who worked in the district prior to outsourcing. It has caused a great deal of heartburn and even a lawsuit. But those who testified Wednesday, mostly teachers and principals, seemed in favor of the NANA contract.

“I know that a lot of you are trying to right a wrong,” said Amy Spargo, principal of Wasilla Middle School. But, given that doing the job in-house would cost more money and likely result in staffing cuts elsewhere, “this is a wrong that can’t be righted by reversing it.”

The school board made an attempt to dispel some of what has been said in opposition to NANA.

Board member Erick Cordero asked about background checks. The answer: NANA does a screening interview, then a preliminary check, then a second interview, then applicants are fingerprinted and the Alaska State Troopers run a background check and the FBI runs one as well. They are also drug-tested, something the school district doesn’t do now and didn’t do previously.

Colleen Hamblin pointed to a statistic that 50 percent of the janitors working for NANA previously worked for the district as members of its Classified Employees Association union.

“They weren’t strangers in the building when they worked for CEA. I don’t know when they became strangers in the school but, according to somebody’s version they did,” she said.

She also said she was tired of hearing that these professional employees who work for NANA somehow care less about their jobs than the janitors who worked for the district did. 

“To continue with that rhetoric, to me, I’m done with it,” Hamblin said.

In the end, the decision was left to a future meeting. Board President Jim Colver asked that a resolution designating whether that $5.4 million should go to an outsourced contract or to hiring janitors in-house be brought to the board’s meeting Wednesday.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.