Huntley School District Virus MRSA Clean Up

If you were a member of Huntley School District 158’s board of education, this would be one of the items in your board packet. It was placed there by Larry Snow.

Read the source documents and draw your own conclusions.

Subject: MRSA Threat and Commitment to Parents that our Schools would be Cleaned before last Friday Morning.

Promises made should be promises kept.

A commitment was made in writing to parents and district employees that the schools would be super cleaned prior to the beginning of school on last Friday.
Should parents have been notified either before or after the fact that students returned to school(s) that had not been properly cleaned?

Are there employee right to safe work place issues when a specific commitment of a “super cleaning” was made and instead they return and see that little or no regular cleaning was done in their classrooms?

Appropriate employee notification.

3. Management and Supervision of the super cleaning work by a hierarchy of 4 managers:

Assistant Director of Operations and Maintenance; Salary: Over $74,000

Who reports to:

Director of Operations and Maintenance; Salary: Over $97,000

Who reports to:

Chief Operations Officer; Salary: Over $103,500

who reports to:

Superintendent; Salary: $155,000

On top of this the taxpayers are paying for the outsourced managerial services of GCA, a professional services company.

With the above management staff plus the administrators at each school, how is it that a timely visual walk through of each classroom was not systematically performed at each school on such an important “super cleaning” day”, well before the start of school?

4. A school board member, Kim Skaja blogged information to the community before 8 a.m. on that Friday morning. Who did she receive her “factual information” from?

Did Mr. Green or Mr. Burkey authorize her to speak for the District on the performance of the schools related to the MRSA cleaning?

5. I have been critical of board members having hired their unemployed friend as a top administrator. What I see in writing here raises a concern that Mr. Burkey is using less than good judgment to properly notify the Board of Education and parents about issues, (even ones potentially affecting the health and safety of students and employees) if underperformance may potentially negatively reflect on the management operations of our schools.

The seriousness is appropriately reflected in Mr. Avina statement: “I feel ashamed”.

My concern is that Mr. Burkey and top administrators apparently feel it is their right to selectively conceal specific underperformance from the Board of Education.

6. On a positive note, I believe that Mr. Rossi, our Director of Transportation would not have used any bus on Friday that was not cleaned. I believe he and his staff understand the importance of health and safety issues. I also believe he and his staff understand my sentiments about not jeopardizing the trust given to him by parents and the District. I also believe our Director of Food Services, Cheryl Lawrence, and her staff, also understands the trust that they have earned carries with it important responsibilities.

To properly inform board members, the below information is provided:

Larry Snow

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Email from individual teachers to the administration that our school(s) were not properly cleaned included:

“…I am concerned that my classroom is never properly cleaned.
I thought the reason for cancelling after school activities last night was so that the school could get a thorough cleaning …”

“People are upset that everything was cancelled last night so they could clean and the building doesn’t look like it was cleaned at all.”
“it was obvious to me that no other surfaces in my room had been cleaned aside from the four tables my students use regularly. I spent 20 minutes this morning sanitizing the remaining three tables, chairs and large island in my room”

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From: Lamb, Chuck

Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 10:58 AM

To: Chesak Elementary

Cc: Burkey, John; Stewart, Glen; Awrey, Terry

Subject: Room Cleaning Today

Importance: High

Chesak Teachers and Staff;

Yesterday District Administration evaluated a potentially serious concern about health and welfare of District 158 children and staff in our buildings as it relates to exposure to the MRSA bacterium. Prompt and dramatic action was taken to notify district staff, parents and community of the situation. As part of this plan of action after school events were cancelled at the Reed Road Campus Schools to allow for thorough ‘appropriate’ cleaning of the buildings. Even though cleaning teams were in the district until 5:30 a.m., reports by Chesak personnel would cause us to believe that cleaning efforts did not meet our expectations.

As a result the Administration has directed a re-cleaning of the building to start immediately to insure that the building is clean and safe. We are ramping up the custodial team to attempt to clean every classroom. They will be cleaning as many classrooms as possible during PE, Music, Art classes or lunch times to sanitize tables and community surfaces. Please be sure to follow your Friday schedule so that we can effectively direct teams to the empty classrooms. The intent is to get to every classroom this afternoon. Any rooms not cleaned and treated this afternoon will be addressed tonight after school.

Please feel free to contact us if you have questions or concerns.

Mr. Lamb

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From: Avina, Armando

Sent: Mon 10/29/2007 3:43 PM

To: Renkosik, Doug; ‘GCA Services (tspaeth@gcaservices.com)’

Cc: Stewart, Glen; Burkey, John; Lamb, Chuck; Henderson, Christy; Serpe, Christa; Hladik, Lisa; Billard, Holly; Sandoval, Juan; Rodriguez, Juan Carlos; Moerke, Wendy; Rothbauer, Barbie

Subject: chesak complaints

As part of the company (GCA) I feel ashamed that the mentioned events took place on Friday morning. Let me try and explain a little bit of what went on since we were busy on Thursday and Friday. Today I had some time to actually sit down and go through my inbox and reply to my e-mails. We got the emergency call and about 12 employees came to work and most of them started working at about 10am over at Martin and 3 of them went home at 3am in the morning after they finish their regular shifts over at chesak. Thursday around 11pm I received a call requesting us to clean the school buses and they were going to call back to find out how many people were in line to help out. I immediately contacted my night supervisor and some of the night leads because I needed to know how many people were willing to stay over and help us out. The reason of why I’m telling you this is because one of the explanations that the night lead over at chesak give us of why the complaints, is because he had the idea that they had a certain frame time to disinfect the school and afterwards they were all going to disinfect the buses in the Adm building. There is only 4 classrooms with complaints between Thursday and Friday and by coincide most of them where from the kindergarten area. Honestly there is no fair answer to give you, but be certain that I will be checking them more frequently than before. I want everyone to feel the presence that a cleaning company is getting the cleaning done over their expectations.
Project Manager

Armando Avina


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