School district sacks NANA

PALMER — The school district’s contract for custodial services is no more.

In a 5-2 vote Wednesday before a packed house, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School Board decided to bring the janitors back as in-house employees, rather than contracting for the work as the district has since 2006.

At a meeting June 10 on the topic, district officials told the school board that because of the district’s benefits package and other costs such as the cost to purchase equipment to replace that owned by the contractor, bringing the workers back in-house for the same dollar amount as the district’s contract with NANA Management Services would result in deep staffing cuts. For example, split-shift janitors would handle most elementary schools, working shifts that begin early in the morning and resume around the time school dismissed for the day.

Board member Ole Larson said he wasn’t convinced the split shifts and other staffing cuts were the only solution.

“There’s got to be two or three or four solutions to a problem, not just one solution,” Larson said.

Board member Erick Cordero asked that the district’s superintendent, George Troxel, come to the body’s August meeting with proposals for how to add $1 million to the janitorial services budget without cutting teaching jobs or classroom programs or other employees.

Troxel agreed to do that, but cautioned, “with close to 90 percent of our budget being in salaries and benefits, anytime we are asked to reduce the budget by a million dollars people will be losing their jobs.”