Inside each neighborhood public school there is a diverse community of professionals who dedicate themselves to making sure your child thrives and succeeds.
From transporting students safely to and from school to feeding nutritious meals to performing maintenance and custodial work, education staff professionals are the backbone of strong schools.
In misguided attempts to save money, many school districts have begun to consider turning over important public services like these to private, for-profit companies. While the promise of saving a few dollars might sound alluring to cash-strapped districts, these savings are all-too-often short-lived and come with a loss of accountability, and diminished services.
In fact, any “savings” a district realizes is almost always the product of slashing pay or benefits of our hard-working education staff professionals.
“Contracting out” these jobs also ignores that education staff professionals play an important role in their community. They live in the same community where they work and they are invested in their schools and their students’ success.
You simply won’t find that same level of commitment from employees hired by private contractors. In places where privatization efforts have been successful, newly hired staff have considerably higher turnover rates than those they replaced. This is easy to understand considering they work for lower pay and less benefits than their predecessors.
We believe that all students deserve to attend schools staffed with a workforce of highly-trained, dedicated, and accountable education staff professionals. The benefits to students, schools, and the community at large of having public employees serve as the essential staff in our schools far outweigh any short-term “savings” that might come from outsourcing their jobs.
Additional Resources
