Cuts to the School District No. 46 (SD46) cleaning budget have left custodians unable to do the kind of deep cleaning that normally gets done in schools over the summer, according to CUPE Local 801 acting president Marnie Baba.
“We’re all going to have to make choices about what we are able to do,” Baba said. At Elphinstone Secondary, where she works as a custodian, “we’re going to have to leave the walls and windows,” she said.
Baba was unsure what custodians at other schools were choosing to leave undone, but noted wiping down and disinfecting surfaces was of utmost importance to her crew.
“I don’t think it’s the same in every school. We weren’t given any direction. We chose not to do our walls and our windows because we felt they had the least impact on the students,” Baba said, adding that leaving them unclean was “very, very difficult” for staff but “there just aren’t enough work hours to get everything done.”
SD46 decided to cut about $80,000 from the cleaning budget at the end of the last school year as a way to find some of the “administrative savings” the province demanded over two years, SD46 board chair Betty Baxter said.
The cut resulted in the loss of the equivalent of three full-time custodian positions.
Baxter said the board chose to cut custodian hours under the administrative savings mandate because a comparison study found SD46 had more cleaners per square foot than many other school districts and because “administrative savings” were defined as anything that didn’t affect school programming.
“The issue of being called administrative savings is we are not able to cut anywhere on programs and we don’t want to cut on programs. Our job is to be able to manage the best programs for kids we can,” Baxter said.
“Cutting custodial where we appear to be adequately staffed was one of the ways we chose to keep those cuts away from kids.”
While having walls and windows dirty at Elphinstone Secondary might not negatively affect students this September, Baba said kids could be impacted more by the cuts when flu season hits.
Fewer custodian hours in schools could mean less deep cleaning and the unwanted spread of germs.
“We’re going to have to work with what we’ve got and continue to make choices,” Baba said.
Baxter noted that setting new custodian standards during the 2015-16 school year might help.
“We’re doing a real look at custodial over the next few months and one of the things we have budgeted for is to have an analysis done to help us get district-wide standards so that there’s not custodial hours in Langdale, for example, that let it be really spiffy and then not quite enough at Elphi,” Baxter said.
Secretary treasurer Nicholas Weswick added that changes in custodian duties at SD46 could be made in the future.
“The specific duties that custodians do on a day to day basis throughout the school year may need to be adjusted as a result of the admin cuts and we’ve acknowledged that,” Weswick said.
In the meantime, Baba said custodians are continuing to get schools as prepped as possible for September.
