Orchard Park bus drivers use cookbook project to raise visibility and respect

Good things are cooking in Orchard Park, N.Y. Bus drivers and other staff in the school district's transportation department pulled together their favorite recipes and those of other PSRPs, teachers, administrators, parents and students and packaged them into a sturdy cookbook that has livened up kitchens and raised more than $12,000 for school programs throughout the district.

While the superintendent's fried potatoes and third-grader Kara Klejnfelder's Jell-O cake are finding their way to Orchard Park dinner tables, the cookbook project has been a five-star public relations success for the local union and especially the transportation department employees. Like many school transportation departments, Orchard Park's had been the subject of discussions about privatization in recent years. For now, thanks in part to the positive publicity the cookbook has generated, the privatization talk has died down and employee relations throughout the system have improved.

"This gave the transportation department some respectful recognition within the school system and the community," says project coordinator Sherry Yates-Voss, a bus driver and grievance chair of the Orchard Park School-Related Personnel Association. "The department will receive nothing from this fundraiser except recognition, respect and publicity for their dedication and service and will be remembered with this cookbook for a very long time."

The cookbook planning committee also slipped a recipe into the back for how to make a transportation department. It talks about combining veterans, rookies and substitute drivers, along with mechanics; tossing in supervisors, clericals and attendants; draining off tension and stirring in understanding, patience and respect; sprinkling with a sense of humor and so on to produce a final product that serves the entire community.

Of the cookbook's proceeds, $5,000 will go to Orchard Park's Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, and the rest will be divided among the district's six schools for items such as a video camera, outside landscaping, books and computer software.

The Orchard Park project grew out of training the AFT conducts each summer near Washington, D.C., on combating privatization. A group from Orchard Park, including Yates-Voss, local president Michele Wolniewicz and vice president David Howes, attended in 1998 partly out of concern for threats to the transportation department. In addition to the cookbook, the 257-member local has raised its visibility in the community with polo shirts in the schools' colors, adorned with their union logo, that most members wear every pay day.

"We believe this unique fundraiser will keep privatization from sneaking in our back door," says Yates-Voss, "and as we are entering into the year of negotiations for the SRP contract renewal, may even pull our local union closer together in solidarity."

To order the cookbook, send a check for $12 ($10 for the book, plus $2 shipping and handling) to:

Orchard Park SRP
c/o Shirley Yates
Attn:  Transportation Dept.
25 Lincoln Avenue
Orchard Park, NY  14127