While visions of sugarplums dance in Cumberland County students’ heads, the school system’s operations team will also pause to rest during winter break — but not without weeks of preparation allowing them to do so.
Kevin Coleman, the associate superintendent of auxiliary services for Cumberland County Schools, told CityView that the work to prepare for the holidays starts several weeks before the school system’s 86 schools let out in December.
“Before they go on winter break, we have a checklist that we send out to schools,” Coleman said. “It’s not a lot to do, but it’s just making sure things are in order and covered and that they have a schedule in place for somebody to come by and check the freezers periodically — just the things that you need to take care of.”
The freezers in particular are important because school cafeteria staff order food from suppliers far in advance. If a freezer were to break, large quantities of food could be lost to spoilage, Coleman said.
“If a freezer goes bad and we lose our food, then we can’t serve breakfast and lunch when they come back,” he said. “We have walk-in storage freezers — big industrial, commercial freezers that keep all of the food for the students.”
Other checklist items might include covering up school computers and strategically parking school buses on campus to prevent break-ins, Coleman said.
'Best staff in the world'
“We have the best custodial staff in the world,” he said. “They work really hard to shut the buildings down and get ready for the break and minimize the chances of having to come back.”
While school’s out from Dec. 20 to Jan. 4, though the operations team takes a pause from regular duties, they may have to accompany contractors into school facilities so repairs can be made while students are gone, according to Coleman.
“We take advantage of students and teachers not being there with contract work,” he said. “We do take advantage of the holiday breaks with outside agencies that come in, and we meet them and let them in the schools and stay with them during that time. We do that centrally, and we try not to bother the schools as much as possible.”
That contracting work is all scheduled prior to the winter break, Coleman said.
Apart from scheduled work, the operations team’s duties encompass on-call tasks, like fire alarms going off at school buildings or vandalization at a school facility, he said.
“No matter when it is, if something happens to one of our buildings, we take care of it,” Coleman said. “We all look forward to the two-week break, but we are on call, and we’ll do whatever we need to do, especially in auxiliary, because we’re the logistics of the school system. We do everything we can to support the teachers teaching students in the classroom.”
Largely, though, staff are under strict orders from Superintendent Marvin Connelly Jr. to “power down” for the duration of the break, he said.
“Unless there’s an emergency, we don’t send emails or phone calls over the break at all,” Coleman said. “If there’s an emergency, we handle it, but we try to limit the amount of communications so we can all enjoy family and friends and try to recharge our batteries.”
Lexi Solomon can be reached at lsolomon@cityviewnc.com or 910-423-6500.
