Slowly opening the door to the girls’ bathroom on the first floor by the cafeteria, Carmen Charo, a member of the janitorial staff, peers inside to see if the facility is empty. Confirming the vacancy, she pulls inside her cart, loaded with a trash can, cleaning spray, towels, and other items. Minutes later, when the door is opened again, the room is clean. Charo goes off to the next bathroom down the hallway.

According to Director of Facilities Rick Dusing, the janitorial staff at Parker has been outsourced for years. “It’s just easier to have the cleaning company, where the standards are always changing, whether you be a hospital, a school, or whatever it might be,” Dusing said. “Parker has always outsourced the cleaning rather than having their own staff.”

Currently Parker holds a two-year contract with a company called Citywide Janitorial & Disposal. For Dusing, one of the advantages to outsourcing the staff is having a consistent number of janitors each day. “It makes it a little easier,” Dusing said, “so you don’t have to deal with people calling in sick or vacation time.”

Under Parker’s contract with Citywide, the company provides two day porters, one of whom works from 7:00am to 3:30pm and the the other who starts at noon to focus on post-lunch clean-up in the hallways and stays until 8:30pm. In addition to the porters, the main body of janitors arrives at the school between 3:00pm and 3:15pm. This group of 10 janitors works until 11:30pm. Each shift is around eight hours long.

From a pure numbers perspective, these shifts and sick day policies create consistency for cleaning the school. “Even if two or three of them on Citywide call in sick, they still have to send 10 people here,” Dusing said. “That’s the advantage. Every day they send in 10 people.”

But when a porter or main body janitor is unfamiliar with the school and is only filling in for a sick day, they can be unfamiliar with the building and their duties. “The disadvantage is that you get somebody who doesn’t know the building, so we have to tell them what to do,” Dusing said. “But at least we have a body to dump the trash and clean up stuff.”

A member of the 12-person staff that arrives at Parker each day is the site supervisor. “He’s not the type that just walks around and checks on people–he’s got his own rooms to clean, but he’ll stop and check,” Dusing said. “Or if there’s a special event, and the library needs to be vacuumed, or the cafeteria needs cleaning, he’s the one that can pull the crew. But they’re still responsible for cleaning all 2500 square feet–which is about the size of the school.”

Dominico Perogrino, who has been Parker’s site supervisor just over a year and an employee at Citywide for four years, regulates the day-to-day cleaning operations with the janitorial staff. Perogrino said, “I have to make sure the crew is doing their jobs, communicate with Parker, like security and teachers, to make sure everything is in order.”

Perogrino has mixed feelings about the job. “It’s easy sometimes, it’s hard sometimes,” Perogrino said. “Sometimes it’s not that dirty, sometimes it’s dirty, with garbage everywhere.” “I enjoy that they pay me,” he said later, “but I wish I could be somewhere else.”

Charo, who works under Perogrino, works at Parker until 11:30pm each day. Working the night shift is easier for Charo and her family because that way she can be with her son each morning before he goes to school. “Sometimes he doesn’t wake up by himself, and I have to help him,” Charo said. “Sometimes I stay here because at this time, he’s coming out from the school, and I stay better because my husband is at the house, and he works in the morning, and I work at this time. So that’s why I have this.”

While the job is generally good for her, at times it can be difficult. “Sometimes people complain for the morning, and they say it’s my fault because I work in the afternoon,” Charo said. “And they check in the afternoon, and the lady working in the morning also in the bathrooms too because sometimes they find blood in the sinks, and it’s at that time I’m not working here. I’m working somewhere else.”

The main problem, Charo said, is miscommunication between the staff of different shifts. “My big boss, yesterday, had a meeting with all of us in the cafeteria,” Charo said. “He showed some pictures about the blood and some problems in the bathrooms.”

Charo was blamed for not cleaning the blood in the sink even though, she said, the mess occurred during someone else’s shift. In an instance like this, photos are taken of the mess and are then presented during full janitorial staff meetings, often led by Perogrino. “Maybe it’s miscommunication, or maybe the people taking pictures need to let the big boss know what time they find the problem,” Charo said. “If they find it in the morning, it’s not me. I start at three.”

Charo often feels she is blamed because she is assigned to clean certain bathrooms each day. “If they take pictures in the morning, and they see blood in the sinks or somewhere else,” she said, “they are going to say maybe it’s me because I have the official job in this part.”

Charo is especially concerned about this type of miscommunication because it doesn’t only affect her job. Charo cleans together with the same woman each day. When she gets in trouble for not cleaning something out of her shift, so does her partner. To make matters worse, Charo doesn’t know who leaves the bathrooms dirty during the morning shift. “It’s two more ladies but I don’t know their jobs,” Charo said. “I can’t say it’s her. I don’t know who takes care of the bathrooms in the morning.”

Unlike Charo, who works with another member of the staff, Patty Lopez, a janitor in the first shift, works alone. “Good thing I work by myself in the first shift,” Lopez said. “I don’t have any problems with the people.”

Lopez has worked for Citywide for almost a year, and she’s been placed at Parker for all of that time. Next year she hopes to stay at Parker. “I like it, it’s easy,” Lopez said. “I like the students and the teachers–they’re nice people.”

Dusing, who among Parker staff works closest with the janitorial staff and Citywide, recognizes that the turnover is different with the cleaning staff than with the school staff. “I would say on any given year, since I’ve been here, the turnover rate is somewhere between 25 and maybe 50 percent,” Dusing said. “Housekeeping and janitorial work can be a little bit lower-paying.”

While Dusing was involved in managing the contract between Parker and Citywide, he knows very little about the contract that the company holds with their employees. “I don’t get to see their contract,” Dusing said. “It doesn’t really concern me how they do that. They do get the holidays off, but I don’t know their health package.”

Dusing’s main interactions with the staff are with Perogrino who then relays information to the eleven other janitors. “I will engage the supervisor when he comes in, or if it’s really big, I notify the company,” Dusing said. “I can call up and say, ‘Hey, nobody cleaned the whole first grade–I don’t know what they were doing last night.’ Besides speaking to the site supervisor, I inform the company that there was a major problem or if somebody doesn’t come to work.”

Parker chose Citywide after a long and extensive interviewing process with thirteen other services companies. “When they’re here, they follow not only our rules but also the company’s–which are pretty in sync because the company that we chose has several school districts within the city and suburbs,” Dusing said. “You look for companies that understand the school environment because you’ve got kids running around and all that sort of stuff.”

Parker’s two-year contract with Citywide expires and is up for revaluation in June. According to Dusing, the school is looking to renew that contract after making minor changes–such as possibly asking that Citywide provide toilet paper for the bathrooms instead of the school buying the product separately.

While the school can add changes to the contract that would affect which party buys supplies or how many janitors are sent to the building each day, the school has no control over the contract that Citywide holds with each of their employees. To fix communication problems that Charo faces each day, those changes would have to come from Citywide itself.