THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 21, 1994 TAG: 9408200417
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 52 lines
Beach schools' contract with ServiceMaster, a company engaged more than a year ago to privatize custodial services, ends not with a bang but a wimp-out.
The job ServiceMaster has done apparently wasn't at issue. Last month, Superintendent Faucette was defending the contract and the company's performance. This month, he moves to sack the company, despite its having ``improved overall the quality of custodial care'' and fulfilled the school system's promise that no permanent custodians would lose their jobs. The sacking comes with the School Board's acquiescence, if not at its instigation; and that doesn't bode well for the attention the board needs to give the school budget.
ServiceMaster's problems, it seems, were being too slow to produce the major savings promised (over four years) and too fast to take the steps necessary to produce those savings: steps such as reducing the number of permanent custodians by attrition, shifting some others to the more productive night hours and laying off temporary workers whom the system had not promised continued em-ploy-ment.
But school-system business is political as well as economic, and common in politics is the philosophy that government must provide not just services but jobs. And not just jobs but secure jobs, whatever the changing needs of schools or the demands on taxpayers. That philosophy surfaced in this contract debate, especially at the Virginia Beach Education Association: It has added 200 worried custodians to its membership this year. It was also instrumental in electing the School Board's six new members. And from the community came the concern expressed by the Rev. Larry S. Hinton: ``Much of the savings is on the backs of a sector of our work force that can afford it the least.''
The solution, though, is not to ditch the economies of privatization in favor of unnecessary hires but to find productive work for all. School principals were concerned about being left short of custodial workers during the day. The school system invited the laid-off custodial workers to apply for other temporary positions. Somewhere in that need and that offer lay a creative match of temporary workers with work that needs doing without wiping out savings from privatizing.
Instead, the school administration wimped. School Board member Elsie Barnes says it won't be ``back to business as usual.'' Good. Superintendent Faucette has allowed as how district custodians must be treated properly. District taxpayers, too. by CNB