The state teacher’s union has thrust itself into the middle of the controversial issue of the possible outsourcing of the WW-P school district’s custodial and maintenance staff.
The New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) has paid for an ad in this issue of the WW-P News, stating that Superintendent Victoria Kniewel announced during her superintendent’s advisory council meeting that the board would vote on the privatization issue on Tuesday, December 15.
However, school officials, including Kniewel herself, insist that no vote will take place on Tuesday, December 15, and that, rather, it is the earliest possible date the board will hold a public hearing of its review and recommendations.
“The Education Finance Committee is going to discuss the findings of this study on a closed session on Monday, November 23,” said Gerri Hutner, the district’s director of communications. “This is just a finance committee, which is just three members of the Board of Education. There will be no decision-making, no recommendations, no action taken” at that meeting. The purpose of that meeting is to study the report on the matter prepared by Edvocate Inc., a consultant hired by the board to study cost-savings, including the outsourcing.
The following day, on Tuesday, November 24, a regular Board of Education meeting is scheduled, but because the three members of the finance committee will have only had the report for less than a day, no discussions or review of the report will take place, said Hutner.
“The full board will, at some point, review the recommendations of the study at a future meeting, no earlier than Tuesday, December 15,” Hutner said. “They would, at the earliest, review the findings and recommendations on December 15. There is no recommendation right now for any type of action” on that date.
“The board is fully aware, as is the administration, that you need to have a full hearing on the report,” said Hutner. “The board will not be taking any action at that time.”
Members of the WW-P school community continued to lobby against the possibility of outsourcing the jobs for the third time in as many meetings on November 10.
The continuing presence of not only the members of the two unions representing the district’s custodial, maintenance, and foreman staff, but also the district’s teachers, has been a staple at school board meetings since the union organized its first showing on October 13. This was after news broke that the board had hired Edvocate Inc., a Toms River-based consulting company, to study the possibility of outsourcing.
Since then, teachers have increasingly voiced their support for the custodians and foremen at meetings, and the board’s November 10 meeting was no different.
Louise Haemmerle, a music teacher at Grover Middle School, recalled examples of the help she received from the custodians, including for evening music programs by students for parents. Helping with everything from the sound system to assembling the choral risers, the custodians are always around to offer their help, even when it is not in their job description, she said.
One time, in May, 2008, the air conditioning broke three hours before hundreds of students and their parents would arrive at the school, Haemmerle said. One of the custodians dropped what he was doing and went to work on the air conditioning unit and was able to get one of the units working half-way through the show. Haemmerle said she and her co-worker had gone home after the event and called the custodian to thank him for the speedy work, but he was still in the building working on the unit.
He left a message for them in their school voicemail in the morning — with a time stamp of 10 p.m. — to tell them he was able to get the one working, but that he had finally given up on the other one. “I’ll work on it tomorrow,” she recalled him saying.
“Who set up this very room tonight?” she said to the board, referring to the custodians.
Joan Ruddiman, a PRISM teacher at Grover Middle School, said her car is often the last car in the lot at night, but that she never worries about staying late. “Whatever time I walk out of this building, I know there are people who know I am here,” she said, referring to the custodians. “You’re getting a whole lot more than 100 percent from me because I’m willing to stay.”
She said she was concerned for the security of the building and the safety of the expensive equipment the school buildings contain. The system works, and “I don’t know why you would want to mess with that for saving a few pennies.”
West Windsor resident Virginia Manzari also said she was concerned about jeopardizing the schools’ security. She said she was doing research and found numerous articles relating to the possibility that schools across the nation will fall victim to terrorist attacks. She said that she found reports from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security indicating that an attack on American schools is in the works and that military personnel in Iraq had even found floor plans for schools in New Jersey, Texas, and other states in the hands of terrorists.
“Our children are our most sacred thing to us,” she said. The district can not ensure the students will be 100 percent safe, but “we should not hold the door open for them, either.”
One resident from the Upper Freehold Regional School District also spoke during the meeting, saying that her district outsourced the jobs and ended up going through four private companies because the work was not good enough. The move ended up costing the district three times the amount it cost to hire its own custodians, she said. She urged the board to look at neighboring districts who have already gone through the process.
Board President Hemant Marathe maintained that the board still had not seen a copy of a packet of information Edvocate has provided to the school district, titled, “Facilities Program Modeling/Assessment, Outsourcing Process and Monitoring Services Proposal.” The packet sets a 10-month time line, in which it calls for a decision on the matter and a bidding process to begin in January.
Debbie DiColo, a teacher in the district and former West Windsor-Plainsboro Education Association president, said she found it “disheartening” that custodians are making a plea for their jobs because they are dedicated to the district and the board members “don’t appear to be listening to them or responding to them.”
Program of Studies. In other business during the November 10 meeting, the board reviewed changes to the language in the Program of Studies, mostly to make the document more consistent.
One of the changes was that students must complete at least 2.5 credits in economics. Another new addition is the language under the Life Skills section, which now states that emphasis must be placed on “green” living. Under the science section, officials spelled out the course offerings for lab sciences, including chemistry, environmental science, and physics.
