The Santa Barbara Unified School District Board of Education recently voted to hire a custodial services manager at $102,000 to help clean up the bathrooms and classrooms at elementary schools.
“It’s pretty sad,” said Meg Jetté, assistant superintendent for business services. “The bathrooms are pretty disgusting.”
The school board vote on July 23 was 5-0.
Jetté said she has spent much of the summer walking through every elementary school in the district to get a handle on the problem. Several years ago, the district decentralized custodial services so that they were handled individually on each campus.
There’s a wide gap, however, in how individual custodians clean and dispose of waste in classrooms depending on the school, prompting the need for hiring a manager who will coordinate cleanup services.
Jetté said several items in the classrooms need to be fixed, including many of the light bulbs, and the bathrooms are apparently filthy.
“It’s just overwhelming how poorly the bathrooms are done,” Jetté said. “It’s very obvious that there’s a lack of time or maybe knowledge of how to clean these bathrooms.”
She said the custodial services manager will be a huge asset.
John Becchio, assistant superintendent of human resources, said that regular and timely disposal of waste in the classrooms is “inconsistent.”
“There’s a lot of work to do in the elementary space,” said Becchio, noting that there’s typically one custodian assigned to a school during the day and one during the night.
Board member Kate Ford said she supports hiring the new manager to also help improve recycling efforts.
“I’ve been shocked at some of the ways that custodians handle waste,” she said.
— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at jmolina@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.