I hope all of you are as well as you can be.
Below is an e-mail that I just sent to the Superintendent and the Board of Education.
Dear Superintendent Myers-Small and Commissioners:
Last year, when 245 security and food service workers were laid off, we shed a lot of tears with our fellow BENTE brothers and sisters. One story in particular stayed with me as it summed up the devastating and lasting effect.
There was a School Sentry (SSO) who walked home every day after work with the students that lived in his neighborhood. They respected him for the simple fact that he lived amongst them. Their principal didn’t, and neither did their teachers. They would ask him how he afforded the car in his driveway, and he would tell them: “You can have nice things, too. If you work hard and have a good job with benefits, do a couple of jobs on the side, you can make something of yourself.”
When he was laid off, the same students in his neighborhood quipped: “How’s that job working out for you… How’s your health care? We saw on the news they took it away.”
We have been trying to work collectively with the District this year in an effort to fill the positions that were vacated – and there are more than one hundred in clerical, food service, custodial, maintenance, transportation, and security. We had some of our workers appear on the news to illustrate the fact that you can make a decent living working for a District that cares about its employees. We are trying to encourage people to come and work here because we understand the importance of having enough staff to transport, greet, and feed the kids, clean the schools, and keep them safe.
Lately, I feel like we are peddling a lie.
Here’s why:
These are our members, but they are YOUR employees. And how this organization treats them – intentional or not – is contrary to the way you insist every student should be treated. I don’t know how much we are paying RTS to get out of this mess, but I am sure it is at a cost far higher than you pay to take care of your own workforce.
We have been championing that BENTE jobs should be filled by city high school graduates. These jobs are a way out of poverty. Instead, we continue to eliminate, discourage, and destroy any pride in working directly for the Rochester City School District. I was a Custodial Assistant working nights for a little above minimum wage at Jefferson in 1994. This job enabled me to feed my family, provide health care, build a pension, and promote through the system. We need to continue that path for city school graduates who have a home life far harder than the one I experienced.
BENTE positions are a drop in the bucket compared to what this District spends on contractors, but it is politically savvy for an administration to proclaim that they eliminated positions in the budget, with no analysis on how much the service will cost elsewhere. Or what the price is on contracting out a service as vital as the transportation of our own kids; the safety of knowing they have the same driver every day for thirty years.
I commend the Board of Education for pushing back on the administration’s proposed elimination of thirteen vacant Bus Driver positions in this year’s budget. But we are now up to 23 vacancies, with more retirements on the way. It is not enough to put vacancies back in the budget; we need support on incentives that will recruit and retain our own workforce in every field.
The District should be using federal dollars to pay frontline workers hazard pay like other government agencies, especially after what they endured last year. By now, the District should be paying BENTE members the rates we negotiated in a contract that was ratified by the membership on August 9 and approved by the Board on August 10. The District should be doing the same due diligence when paying temps and contractors as it does when scrutinizing its own employees.
Our workforce feels depleted, underappreciated, and disrespected. On their behalf, I feel compelled to let you know what they are going through.
Respectfully,
Dan DiClemente, President
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