Service Master website
NHPS' new part-time custodial contractor.
The city’s school board voted Friday to approve a one-year, $5.8 million contract with a new part-time custodial contractor.
The Board of Education took that 5 – 0 vote during a special meeting that was held online only, via Zoom.
Board members voted in support of a new agreement with the Ohio-based company Integrity Concepts LLC Inc., which does business under the name of ServiceMaster Elite Janitorial Services.
The contract will cost $5,868,495 in total, and will go from July 1 of this year through June 30, 2026. The deal also includes two one-year renewal options.
Click here to read the school board memo about the contract and full agreement.
Friday’s vote follows the school board’s decision in May to table the proposed ServiceMaster contract, which the district said at the time would cost $5.4 million. “The chief concern was that ServiceMaster is not being party to the Regional Collective Bargaining Agreement in the same manner that current vendor is a party,” Asst. Supt. Paul Whyte wrote in a Wednesday letter to the Board of Ed.
The cost of services in the deal approved on Friday is roughly $413,000 higher than the one proposed in May. The final amount for ServiceMaster, however, is still less than the $5,978,259.25 that the district had paid New Haven’s current part-time custodial contractor, SJ Services, this fiscal year.
At Friday’s meeting, Whyte explained the $413,000 increase to the ServiceMaster deal as “the cost to meet the union standards [that] were proposed.”
Whyte also said that, in response to a May 29 meeting Supt. Madeline Negrón had with the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 32BJ, the district and ServiceMaster renegotiated the proposed contract.
“They have agreed to join the area wide agreement and then accordingly reorganize their pricing structure and it was still within our tolerance,” Whyte said.
Board member Edward Joyner asked Whyte whether the district will have control over who the contractor hires. Whyte responded that the company has agreed to consider hires of current part-time custodians. The district plans to survey school principals and have them recommend custodial employees to bring over into the new contract.
When asked about the administrative structure for the contracting services, Whyte said that the district will have regular meetings with ServiceMaster and “there will be no change orders, change increases in price or any overtime assigned without direct consulting from the district approving it before it happens.”
He added that avoiding surprises during the billing process is a goal for next fiscal year and will be helped by the contractor’s “robust monitoring” through an electronic employee-attendance-tracking tool to ensure staff are on site.
Click here to read a previous article about concerns that the district had with SJ Services. A representative from SJ Services told the Independent for that article that, since the start of this school year, the company has been using an electronic attendance GPS tool to track its employees.
Joyner’s concluding suggestion Friday was for the district to consider developing a plan to engage principals, SPMTs, and full-time local custodians to assess the contractor’s quality of work.
The board members who attended the online meeting then voted unanimously in support of the ServiceMaster deal. Board members Andrea Downer and Orlando Yarborough, the president of the board, were not present at Friday’s special meeting.
Watch full special meeting above.