In the November Board Advisory Council District 5 meeting, WCPSS Maintenance and Operations Senior Directory, Greg Clarke and Chief Financial Officer, David Neter, presented information abut the maintenance and care of our school facilities.
Here are my takeaways from the meeting.
Slide Presentation
The next Board Advisory Council meeting for District 5 is Tuesday, Jan 28 at 9:30am at St Augustine’s College. If you are interested in attending or have questions about these notes, please contact our school representative Marie Dexter at [email protected].
Here are my takeaways from the meeting.
- Maintenance and Operations care for EXISTING schools, repairing minor things such as light bulbs to large projects, such as HVAC system.
- WCPSS has 25 million square feet of facilities (equivalent to 12,500 homes) to care for with a budget of about $100 million. To understand the number of maintenance employees per school, Mr. Clarke presented the information in comparison to number of homes.
- There is 1 Facility Maintence Tech for 174 homes.
- 1 HVAC Tech for 1250 homes
- 1 plumber for 2083 homes
- 1 electrician for 1250 homes
- School administrators (K-12) met with Maintenance and Operations to develop the priority list, ranking the urgency of items such as graffiti removal, temperature adjustments, water leaks, and so on.
- On an average day, about 1000 work orders are submitted and approximately 450 work orders are completed.
- During the early 2000s when WCPSS was experiencing explosive growth, some of the maintenance budget was used to build new schools. As a result, some repairs were delayed and we are still playing catch up.
- The Maintenance and Operations needs $25M over 5 years to improve response times.
- Challenges include recruiting and retaining qualified staff and skilled trade workers. The current vacancy rate is 25%. The salaries in the private sector can be three times as much as WCPSS can pay.
Slide Presentation
The next Board Advisory Council meeting for District 5 is Tuesday, Jan 28 at 9:30am at St Augustine’s College. If you are interested in attending or have questions about these notes, please contact our school representative Marie Dexter at [email protected].