School custodians facing cuts

For Janice Jenkins, 47, the cut in her workday as a custodian at P.S.99 in Kew Gardens - from an eight-hour workday to six - will make her a part-time employee. Because she is paid hourly, she will lose one fourth of her salary, as well as medical coverage for her two kids - Dannika, 17, and Olivia, 14, the latter of which has had asthma since she was a child.
Without coverage, a doctor visit for Olivia will cost her mother $50, a single day inhaler treatment at the hospital will run about $276, and if the girl needed to be brought to the emergency room, the bill would be much higher. Jenkins will also have to pay for her daughter's daily and rescue inhalers.
&#8220As the winter months come, when she gets sick, she gets bad,” Jenkins said about her daughter's respiratory problems. &#8220I will have to throw my kids on the Man upstairs and go where He guides me.”
Jenkins, who has worked as a custodian for a total of nine years, said that she has been considering finding another job, or even part-time work, to help pay for the additional medical expenses, but she has not yet made up her mind. She had hoped to find a larger apartment - hopefully in Queens - than the one bedroom where she currently lives with her daughters in Jamaica, but with her salary cut and medical expenses, she does not think she will be able to afford a two bedroom. Jenkins said her hourly cuts will go into effect on Friday, October 20.
&#8220It's just a real hardship,” she said. &#8220It's going to be very hard to maintain everything that you are supposed to do in six hours that you do in an eight-hour period.”
The hours of custodians at 1100 schools throughout the city will be cut, and the cuts at each school and for each worker will vary, said Sal Alladeen, President of SEIU Local 74, which represents 13,000 city workers - 6,000 of which work in city schools as custodians, fire safety officers, and handypersons. Alladeen, along with Councilmember Hiram Monserrate, held a press conference at City Hall on Tuesday, October 10, denouncing the cuts.
In total, $11.8 million - 3.5 percent - will be removed from the budget. The amount of money cut from the budget will depend on the school - 2 cents per square foot at schools under 50,000 square feet and between 9 and 11 cents per square foot for schools with more than 200,000 square feet. At most schools, the hours of the last employee hired were cut, but at some schools, the cuts were too large to slash from one person's hours and were shared split more than one employee.
&#8220We just fought with Albany to get billions of dollars for school construction,” Monserrate said. &#8220We know that schools that are not maintained often cost more to repair. It seems that this is penny wise and pound foolish.”
The biggest issue for his union members, Alladeen said, will be the loss that many face in health care. In addition, Alladeen said he is worried that the cuts will snowball into bigger slashes to the budget, which also contain supplies and money to repair damages to the schools and clean up graffiti.
&#8220There are a lot of things going into the custodial budget. It covers everything,” Alladeen said.
Alladeen said that, like many of his union members, he learned of the cuts last week through memos, and charged that the Department of Education (DOE) had hired a consulting firm - Alvarez & Marshal - for which the $17 million price tag for to recommend changes in the City's school system cost more than the cuts to the custodial budget would save.
On Tuesday, August 29, Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum called for a suspension into the DOE's contract with Alvarez & Marshal, saying, &#8220Even a cursory check of Alvarez & Marshal's track record would be enough to set off alarm bells.”
&#8220There's someone in an office with a pencil saying that we'll save $11.8 million [through the cuts] … I don't think that's prudent,” Alladeen said, adding that he did not know why money from the custodial budget was cut when the square footage at city schools had remained the same or gotten larger.
&#8220We hired a consulting firm to take a fresh look at the way we do business,” said DOE spokesperson Margie Feinberg.
The aim of the cuts, Feinberg said, was to reduce bureaucracy and give more money to the City's schools. She said that her office had sent out a memo with creative ways to cut the custodial budget without cutting staff.
Feinberg released a statement explaining where the money was reallocated - new assessment systems, leadership development, and the empowerment schools program, announced in June.
&#8220We announced last school year that we are in the midst of redirecting resources from central and regional offices to schools. In the first phase of that effort, approximately $80 million was redirected from central and regional offices to fund new state-of-the-art accountability and interim assessment systems and leadership development, as well as additional discretionary funds and a new streamlined support structure for the Empowerment Schools,” Feinberg wrote. &#8220As part of the next phase of this effort to streamline central budgets and better support all schools, custodial allocations are being reduced by an average of approximately 3.5 percent citywide.”
&#8220We are not telling custodial engineers to cut their staff. We are asking them to find efficiencies in the management of custodial services,” she wrote.