“Well, We Go Through A Lot of Toilet Paper”

ARAMARK Educational Services, the management conglomerate that oversees the New Haven Public Schools’ operations — from cooking up breakfast buns more tastily and efficiently to saving energy to maintaining and patrolling school grounds — often has a representative around the table at the Board of Education’s (BOE) monthly Administration and Finance Committee meetings. For around this table, on the second floor of BOE headquarters on Meadow Street, contracts are approved and amended to the tune of millions of dollars.

Monday’s meeting was no different, except this time there were several ARAMARK guys around the table. Andrew Butler, on the right, executive director of ARAMARK’s facilities services, introduced Steven Percival, to his left, the new director of custodians and grounds. The committee was presented with contract #2007007 in the amount of $388,000 for janitorial supplies for the fiscal year 2007 – 8. Percival’s going to need what these funds can buy in order to do his new job.

​“That’s a lot of money,” said Frances Padilla (pictured with, right to left, Robin Golden, and Sue Weisselberg), who was chairing the committee for chairman Rich Abbatiello.

“Well,” answered Percival, ​“we go through a lot of toilet paper.”

In truth, it’s a lot more than toilet paper— all paper products, all cleaning supplies, from a long list of vendors, including $197,159.84 for the Eastern Bag & Paper Company. Butler said that the contract was entirely a result of the city purchasing department buy all such items, for purposes of saving money, for all city offices.

“Who do I talk to about the toilet papers in the bathrooms at Clemente!” Padilla continued, with an admiral attention to detail. ​“They needed some more when I was there.”

“Actually,” Butler explained, ​“the $388,000 is precisely what was spent last year. If more needs to be spent, we have so budgeted a margin.”

The committee approved the contract for consideration by the full board. Likewise they approved, for $645,786, the 2007 – 8 contract renewal for ARAMARK’s food services management. This was no increase from last year, and there was also no performance bonus of $60,000, a usual feature of the contract, granted this year. ​“The bonus, if it is earned this year,” explained Robin Golden, the departing (in August) chief operating officer of the NHPS, will be earned one school at a time if ARAMARK succeeds in increasing the numbers of students signing up for breakfasts and lunches at six different schools.

If ARAMARK taketh from the budget, it also giveth, and, in philanthropic ARAMARK news, Golden announced that the $50,000 scholarship fund that ARAMARK had contributed to NHPS in the winter has now been distributed.

“The superintendent,” she said, ​“wanted to make sure that the funds go to kids who, without the support, might not go to college. Therefore, $39,000 is going to the Gateway Community College Foundation to support 12 kids with full scholarship, including books for one year. These are students the first in their family to go to college. Another $10,000 was distributed to the New Haven Scholarship Fund to be distributed according to their regular process. And $1,000 is going to a Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School grad, Alana Huges, to launch her education at Adelphi University in New York.

At a scholarship lunch honoring the kids on Thursday, Gateway’s President Dorsey Kendrick will be one of the speakers. And so will Andrew Butler of ARAMARK. ​“A community college can be a good path,” he said. ​“I went to community college for two years,” he said, ​“and then I transferred to the University of Massachusetts. I was recruited out of U Mass by guess which company? You got it. ARAMARK.”