April 17, 2014 Board Meeting

As always, these are my opinions only and not the opinions of the Pendleton County School Board or any other individual board members.

 Custodial outsourcing was a topic that generated much public discussion for this board meeting.  The research I have read does not support outsourcing custodial services in small districts. 

·        The main reason is that custodians in small districts often wear many hats.  When bidding these services out, it is difficult to identify the portion of the costs that are “pure” custodial.  I believe our bids produced mixed results because of these hybrid positions.

·         When I attended the KSBA Conference in January, I spoke to a vendor that provides custodial services.  This vendor told me that the savings is primarily because the vendor can buy the cleaning supplies in bulk.  What impact would this outsourcing have on our local economy when the supplies are purchased from other parts of the country and brought here?

·         The vendor also told me that if we used their services, they would have to bring someone into our district to “manage” the custodians.  I immediately thought to myself the last thing we need in our district is another manager.

·        One final note on custodial outsourcing.  The custodians in our district have helped care for our students.  They have cleaned up after our children when they have been sick in the classroom.  They assist our kids when they need help tying their shoes.  They provide an extra security measure in our district because they often know who should be on the school grounds or who shouldn’t be.  It takes many people to educate our students-our teachers, our counselors, our cafeteria workers, our bus drivers, our custodians, etc.  Let us value each member of the team and not treat them like they can be easily discarded.

We voted (3-2) to move forward on a school board student representative.  I am very excited about this and glad I pushed to have this introduced in our district.  While at NKU, I have seen firsthand how much student voice can add to the discussion.  I believe this will be beneficial to our district and help keep us focused on what is important- student success.

The Board voted to add a full-time school psychologist in our district.  In previous years, we had a school psychologist come into our district once a week to do the necessary assessments.  Sam Jones, Director of Special Education, mentioned that our students needed to be seen and services were being delayed because they were not able to be assessed in a timely manner.  Because of my work at the hospital, I have cared for many people that have overdosed on heroin or have struggled with addiction.  Many of these patients are from our county and have children in our district.  I want to ensure that we have the resources available to identify students that may need psychological help because we cannot grow them academically until these issues are identified.