At a meeting at Sequoyah Middle School in 2015, parents there to discuss overcrowding at several schools in the area commented on ongoing air conditioning problems at the schoolhouse.
Two years later, the problems there persist.
Parents and teachers post pictures on social media of trash cans filled to the rim with water from leaky roofs and mold on walls, and tell stories of overheated classrooms.
School district officials say they are aware that buildings have problems, and are working through them as fast as they can.
“We’re far from where we were even a few years ago” in addressing maintenance needs, Chief Operations Officer Joshua Williams said.
DeKalb County Board of Education member Joyce Morley’s frustration with maintenance surfaced during the board’s meeting in September. During discussion on a contract extension for SSC Service Solutions, a facilities maintenance vendor, Morley said she could not see where the company was having any impact.
“There’s no way in the world a school year should work where you’ve got got all these buildings that haven’t been pressure washed, there’s ceiling tiles missing, garbage cans in the middle of the floor catching water,” she said. “There should have been inspections of all these buildings before school started.”
Channel 2 Action News reported in August that construction was ongoing in Miller Grove Middle School in Decatur when school started.
School board member Vickie Turner said a parent emailed her about garbage cans in lunchrooms collecting water as children eat at Miller Grove.
“I went over to the school and there are large garbage cans in the cafeteria where children are eating their lunch,” she said. “That’s not even acceptable for me to eat my lunch next to a large garbage can, but the can was there because you got a hole in the roof and you got water dripping so it’s trying to capture the water.
“This is a very real present distress that our children are trying to navigate.”
Morley said walls at Stoneview Elementary School still had not been painted during the second week of school. She also said she thinks use of outside vendors is getting out of hand, and that the district should do a better job increasing its in-house staff.
“When things need to be done, there’s an internal obligation when you are totally employed by the district as opposed to being contracted by the district,” she said. “There’s an allegiance you have with the district. I just want them to ramp up the number of people we have internally.”
Superintendent Steve Green said, “There’s a plan to increase our capacity to wean ourselves of outside vendors, but we will always have a blend of internal and vendors.”
SSC Service Solutions received a contract of up to $5.4 million in its first year, 2016. Morley voted against a contract extension, which was approved by the board.
Williams said that working with the contractor, the district has provided more than 1,100 hours of staff training on a new reporting system and safety regulations. It’s also completed nearly 18,000 preventative and corrective maintenance work orders since January.
In comparison, more than 5,000 work orders went unfulfilled during the 2011-2012 school year.
The number of maintenance workers the district employs has dropped dramatically over the years.DeKalb employed about 302 maintenance workers at the start of the 2002-2003 school year. Five years ago, that crew was down to 223. There are currently about 85 workers. This summer, maintenance workers came to a school board meeting to discuss how little their pay had changed since 2009, with at least one man saying after the meeting he currently made less than he did 8 years ago.
Williams said the contractor helps pick up some of that slack.
“The contractor services has really enhanced our ability to provide a more organized and professional delivery of services,” he said. “We still have a ton of work, but the management of it is more effective because of the addition of resources.”
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