Bethlehem School District Outsourcing Jobs

It's being reported the Bethlehem School District is outsourcing a bunch of jobs. While that does appear to be a positive from the district's point of view a word of caution.

You Get What You Pay For
From my experience when the place I worked at did this should serve as a word of caution...

(1) Nearly everyday someone else showed up other then the person the day before. They had to be quickly trained on the fly. This added lots of costs in lost productivity. In the case of educating, feeding students etc. it's not just downtime like it was for the company where I worked. We're talking about the quality of education, the way classrooms are cleaned and the way in which food will be prepared.

(2) There is such a thing as employee loyalty. That goes out the window when someone working knows they have no future hope of getting a steady job no matter how well or hard they work.

(3) Whether it be the company I worked for or the Bethlehem School District both expect to pay less then they had been paying. The temp agency needs to take a cut out of that lesser amount. Therefore temp workers will be lucky to receive 75% of what the workers along side of them receive or once did. What kind attitude do you think these workers will have?

(4) Time and again we've heard in the news about how government contractors fudged background checks. Yeah I know, this time it will be different.

It's about administrators taking responsibility. It may seem like a great way to absolve the district of possible lawsuits and doing a run around with problems from the unions. Contracting with someone else to worry about employees and what they are paid never turns out well, does it?

How About This Instead?
Administrators grow a set and face down new hirees and unions explaining the terms going forward. Not just by threatening them, but sitting down and explaining why. If future employees (or their unions) refuse to see why this is necessary and become unreasonable, then start shutting down schools. Start sending those students to private charter schools until employees come to realize it's not in their best interest to keep up the fight.

Believe me I don't want things to end up this way, but if employees can't be reasonable sometimes they've need to be shown the alternatives. It's in the best interest of taxpayers who've been overburdened. Some may say isn't that what Bethlehem School District is doing by outsourcing? NO

Outsourcing is far different from supporting or creating charter schools. One creates competition. The other (outsourcing) does not. One continues to hold a monopoly on education (outsourcing) the other does not.

Changes are coming one way or the other. I prefer education remains under government, but taxpayers should not be held hostage nor employees be outsourced because of their unreasonableness to compromise either.
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