AFT affiliate in Alabama brings together custodians to push for better training,
districtwide standards

When it comes to deciding who cuts the grass at school, you would expect most school districts to have a pretty straightforward policy in place. But in the 60 schools in Jefferson County, Ala., each principal has control over such decisions, so it might be the custodian, it might be a groundskeeper or it might even be an office worker.

Needless to say, that decentralized control by principals leads to huge differences in training, work quality and job expectations for custodians. The Jefferson County Federation of Teachers would like to see more uniform standards for custodians in the district, which includes Birmingham. “Right now, everybody is doing things differently,” says Rodney Kennedy, an AFT member and head custodian at Gresham Elementary School. “Each principal has a different outlook, when things really need to be centralized.”

Kennedy and four other AFT custodians in the district have been appointed to a union task force to look at the whole range of issues for their job category. Sometime down the line, the union hopes to get them on the agenda at a school board meeting to talk about those issues. “Instead of having the president do it, we usually allow the members who work in that area make the presentation,” says Ralph Bonner, a union field representative who has been working with the custodians. “That usually works better.”

With most other PSRP jobs in the district—including food service, transportation and maintenance—there is one director in charge at the district level. But that’s not the case with custodians. As Kennedy sees it, you don’t want a director who has never done the job, but he believes having a former custodian oversee operations in all the schools would be an improvement. He believes that could be a benefit for both the union and management.

Right now, custodians sometimes go to the union to deal with issues that really should be covered by broader district policies; one example might be vacation schedules. “If you have a problem that can be solved without going through the union,” says Kennedy, who is a union steward at his school, “it’s better for the union and the employee” as well as the district. It also frees the union to deal with bigger concerns.

Some long-range outcomes of a focus on custodial operations in Jefferson County, Bonner says, could be better training for custodians before they actually go on the job, improved working conditions and clear standards for all custodial employees.