Cleaning house: Scarborough schools to explore outsourcing custodial services

SCARBOROUGH — As it heads into what town officials concede will be a tough budget year, the Scarborough School Department is looking to save money by outsourcing custodial services at its six buildings – a move the local union promises to oppose.

On March 13, the department issued a request seeking cleaning companies capable of taking on the 612,631 square feet of space now maintained by an in-house staff of 30, a little more than half of whom are full-time employees.

“It was kind of out of the blue, wondering what was going on, and why we didn’t know anything about it,” high school custodian Josh Collins said on Tuesday.

The move comes as the janitors’ union is at the end of a three-year contract and beginning negotiations with the school district on its next deal. According to Collins, now in his third year with the district and part of the negotiating team for the union, neither he nor any of his peers had an inkling their jobs were on the chopping block – not until some saw the request notice in the newspaper.

“There was a lot of hurt,” he said. “It was nothing anyone would expect, to have the town going after your job like that.

“They’ve kind of threatened us with it for the past year and a half, saying, ‘We could just outsource you,’ but we always saw it as an empty threat to keep people motivated,” said Collins. “But it hadn’t been mentioned in a long time. We had pretty high hopes for a new contract. We certainly weren’t expecting this, especially so close to our first negotiating session.”

According to Facilities Director Todd Jepson, three firms – BSC Cleaning and UGL-Unicco, both of South Portland, and Benchmark Cleaning Services of Portland – met the March 26 deadline to submit evidence they can handle the job.

“Once we review the documents, we will then determine which firms will be allowed to respond to our [Request for Proposal], which will be sent out to the qualified firms in the coming weeks,” Jepson said Monday afternoon.

Spending in Scarborough’s next school budget, the first submitted by new Superintendent George Entwistle III, is up $3.52 million (9.86 percent) to $39.17 million. Increased teacher salaries (up $713,773), combined with the loss of $1.13 million in stimulus money from the feds, leaves the district still reeling from recent job cuts looking for any way to rein in the bottom line.

“I think that in this time, when we are trying to protect every dollar that we can and keep it in the classroom, we would be remiss if we did not look at all aspects of the operation we run to see if there are more creative and/or alternative ways to run those more efficiently,” said Entwistle said in a March 21 interview.

Collins said custodians harbor no ill will toward teachers. Instead, it’s administrators who they say are bleeding the budget.

“We’re the lowest earners, we’re the bottom of the totem pole. It’s like going after the little guy just to save a couple of bucks,” he said. “I think a lot of negative feelings right now, honestly, comes from the raises that administrators got last year. It was 7 percent, after we were all told there was no money in the budget. Well, that’s a lot of money at their pay scale.”

Last year, two vacant custodian jobs were cut to save money.

“When we lost those positions last year, it was tough, especially at the high school,” said Collins. “We made it work, but it’s hard. People are really being stretched to get everything done and keep the schools looking nice.”

On Friday, Jepson said the district spends $1.1 million on salary and benefits for custodians, who average $14 per hour. After starting at $13.55 per hour, Scarborough school custodians can, after 24 years, earn a maximum of $16.55 per hour. The benefits package available after the first year of employment includes 80 percent coverage of health insurance premiums for both individual and family plans and 90 percent premium payment for dental, along with life insurance and Maine State Retirement coverage.

According to Jepson, the district feels a private contractor may be able to find efficiencies in hourly labor, in part because most cleaning companies train employees to specialize in specific tasks, while school custodians do a little bit of everything within an assigned area. At the very least, Jepson said, outside workers may not get health and retirement benefits as generous as what the school pays, if they get any at all, which would mean a bottom-line savings for taxpayers.

“We’re not pursuing this for reasons of incompetence,” said Jepson. “Our custodians do good work. It’s really a cost savings we’re trying to achieve.

“In the last two years, we eliminated almost 40 education positions,” said Jepson. “If we can save the school department from having to eliminate teacher jobs by getting better pricing on cleaning services, well, I would think the taxpayers would be more concerned with losing teachers than custodians.”

Jepson said the proposal does not include three maintenance workers who oversee plant maintenance, or the purchase of cleaning supplies, which he thinks the school can get just as cheaply on its own. All that’s on the table, he said, are the cleaning jobs.

But Crystal Goodrich, president of the Scarborough Education Association, said the union will not let those jobs go without a fight.

“We will work to block that kind of outsourcing,” she said on Monday.

Goodrich said school management is barred from adopting any outside contract without union approval. However, the contract covering custodians and food service workers says only that the school board “shall not enter into any agreements or contract with its employees” that “conflicts with, adds to, or subtracts from the terms” of the agreement. How attorneys might parse that language is unclear. While the district is not proposing to form a new agreement with employees – it wants to hire an outside firm and cut the employees loose – its proposal would certainly seem to “subtract from the terms” as they currently exist.

Still, Entwistle does not seem inclined to play hardball.

“This is a step-by-step process and our union representatives will need to be at the table with us,” he said.

Of course, the district’s negotiating team will need to meet with union reps anyway. The contract expires June 30.

Entwistle denies the district might take advantage of the June 30 expiration to simply dismiss custodians en masse. Because an outside contract is unlikely to be in place before the start of the new budget year July 1, Entwistle said, the district will negotiate a new contract with custodians in good faith. Any savings to be had from outsourcing “is certainly not going to be built into this budget,” he said.

“I can’t believe it would happen before the summer,” agreed Jepson. “But it may happen before the new school year starts. From a practical standpoint, that would be the ideal timing.”

If custodians are let go, they must be given 30 days notice, according to the contract, with part-timers first in line to get the boot.

How upcoming negotiations with the union might go remains to be seen. Entwistle said because the outsourcing proposal promises a reduction in force of some kind, the very idea “will almost certainly” figure into contract talks. However, Goodrich said, the union intends to pursue a new three-year deal as if no such thing is in the works.

“It should not impact negotiations that are happening now,” she said. “The negotiations will continue regardless of the outsourcing quote and, as we go forward, it would be the standard contract negotiation that we will follow.”

Still, Goodrich acknowledged the possibility that custodians and food service workers might start the next fiscal year working without a contract.

Only “about half” of the custodians, primarily the full-timers, are union members, said Jepson. Like Entwistle, he predicts the outsourcing plan will weigh heavily on contract talks.

“We may not decide after the RFP process to pursue outsourcing,” Jepson said. “If the numbers don’t come back looking like we can save money – and we need a good six-figure number in order to make it a go – I don’t guess we could use it as a negotiating piece. However, if we can save, maybe they would negotiate to try and preserve their contract.”

Again, Goodrich claims the district can’t do anything without union approval.

“We basically have the right to negotiate with the school before any kind of services are purchased from outside the school system,” she said.

But does that hold once the contract expires June 30?

“We certainly hope to have something in place by then,” she said. “We feel the school board has shown that they really value their employees and they want to treat them fairly. That’s what we hope for in these negotiations and as we go forward.”

Goodrich said there are potential drawbacks to outsourcing custodial work that could mitigate money saved. For one, the district could get what it pays for.

“You can get a lower rate, but you don’t know what you are going to get, or the quality of services,” she said.

There’s also a question of security.

“Our employees are very familiar to the community,” said Goodrich. “That makes a big difference, rather than having people in our schools no one knows.”

Jepson said he’s visited area schools that outsource all or part of their custodial work, including Gorham and Falmouth, and found “no difference” in cleanliness. Security, he said, is something interested firms will have to prove.

Meanwhile, Entwistle said the proposal does not necessarily mean all custodians in Scarborough will lose their jobs. He was superintendent in Falmouth when outside cleaners were first brought in under a “hybrid model,” in which local custodians tended to the smaller schools, while the contractor took on the larger buildings.

“I think what we will do is explore any and all combinations and opportunities,” he said. “We would not be responsible if we were not to explore ways to be more efficient and to direct more of our operating budget to education.”

“Right now, we’re just trying to determine if there are even firms out there willing to do what we want them to do at the level we want them to do it,” said Jepson. “I think the bottom line for me is, one of the main reasons we are doing this is to see if we can achieve an economy of scale for the town, so that tax dollars are spent for the school department wisely.”

On the union side, there’s hope that taxpayers, who’ve been vocal in opposing cuts to teaching positions, will prove just as protective of custodians.

“We hope school board members will all see the value of continuing to have their employees instead of some outside vendor,” said Goodrich. “The custodial staff is very vested in keeping their positions the way they are, and the benefits the way they are. They really value their jobs in the school system and they hope the community values them as well.”

“Honestly, I have high hopes,” said Collins, the janitor. “I love my job. I love the community. I live in town. My family’s been here for generations. To be let go would be a slap in the face, especially when I feel like I’ve personally done my best by going above and beyond my job description every day.”