How Low Will They Go?
By Jill Jenkins
Schools are made up of many support
people: bus drivers, secretaries, custodians, cafeteria managers, cafeteria
helpers, teacher aids and many others.
Most of these positions in the past were modest paying jobs that included
benefits like health insurance. To save
money, many districts have made these positions part time relieving themselves
of both health insurance expenses and retirement expenses. The problem some districts are facing is how
do districts find enough qualified employees who are willing to work under these conditions?
Take for example cafeteria
workers. One of my friends manages a high
school cafeteria and is responsible for hiring two-hour cafeteria workers. Not only do these workers earn minimum wage,
but need to pay $60.00 to be fingerprinted for a background check and purchase
their own uniform. In exchange, they can
work two hours a day, five days a week for nine months out of the year. At that rate, they will work for free for
several weeks to pay for their background check and their uniform. As a result, it is getting difficult to find
employees to fill these openings.
Bus drivers also are only paid part
time, but since they too must pay for a uniform and a background check and keep
a Commercial Drivers License current, they have added expenses. Furthermore, many of them decide to take a
more lucrative position with trucking companies or local bus companies. Some school districts have decided to
contract with private bus companies to circumvent the entire problem, but those drivers are
rarely fingerprinted which means they are not meeting state guidelines. As a result of the shortage of qualified drivers, students are often late to
school because the districts have insufficient drivers.
Custodians are equally as difficult
to keep. Last year, at the school in
which I was teaching, the night custodian quit.
Because the district couldn’t find a replacement, for several months,
students-sweepers cleaned our room bereft of an adult supervisor. I bet you can imagine how sparkling clean
they were. Finding good help is
difficult when the help is not appropriately compensated for their time. Still, the program saves the district money.
Substitute teachers used to be the
job for retired teachers trying to augment their retirement, or teachers
looking for an opening. Most districts
did not pay substitutes benefits, but a substitute often earned $80.00 to
$100.00 a day. If they substituted daily, a substitute could earn from $400 to
$500 a week minus taxes. However, with
the new guidelines, if they substitute every day they would be entitled to
health insurance and the district doesn’t want to pay health insurance on them,
so they can only work two to three days a week.
Retired teachers are not allowed to substitute for the first year of
retirement without losing their retirement benefits. As a result, there is a shortage of
substitutes. This means that teachers
who have a consultation periods are used to substitute for the substitute the
district could not find and earn an extra $10 or $20. That should make everyone happy, right?
Secretaries were the greatest
support staff. Currently there is only
one secretary in the school who works full-time. As a result, some of the paperwork that used
to be delegated to the secretarial staff is either being piled on the
principal’s secretary or distributed to the teaching staff. Some full time jobs are simply handled by asking the employee to complete the same amount of work in half the time. These employees are stressed and are often deprived of even bathroom breaks to complete the tasks assigned. Other work is reassigned to teachers to complete. Ever wonder why the teachers’ cars are in the
parking lot long before school, long after school and sometimes on
weekends? Somebody’s got to do it.
