Friday afternoon I was cleaning out my closet when the school board president walked in, closed the door, and set a photocopy on my utility sink.
Gil Fontenot. Sixty-two, owns two auto parts stores, came through Jefferson himself in the seventies.
He told me the truth first, which I appreciated. The custodial contract was signed in June, it runs three years, and there was nothing he could do about that between Friday and Monday, and he was not going to stand in my closet and pretend otherwise.
Then he told me what his wife found in a filing cabinet at the PTA office Wednesday night.
There is a line in the Jefferson PTA budget called Closet. Six hundred dollars a year, approved every spring since 2011, and every current board member has voted for it fourteen years running without asking what it is.
It buys socks. Mittens, hats, and a couple hundred pairs of kids’ socks, and it has come to my closet in a box every October since 2011 and I never once had to ask.
Doreen Bissonnette wrote the justification the first year. One paragraph in the minutes of a PTA meeting in April of 2011, and nobody has read it since.
Line item: Closet. Six hundred dollars, no receipts required, no reporting. Mr. Deeds has been buying dry socks for wet children out of his own paycheck since at least 2004 and will not say so and will not be thanked. This board is going to quit letting a custodian on custodian wages carry that by himself. Do not put his name on it anywhere but here.
Doreen is the grandmother of the little girl who cried by the trophy case. She wrote that when the girl’s mother was still in high school.
I sat down on a bucket in my own closet and Gil Fontenot stood there and let me.
Here is how it ended, and it is not as clean as people want.
The contract stands. Those men are working that building, two of them are good and one is not, and none of it is their fault and I have told them so.
The district created a position in January. Building support specialist, a made-up title, half funded by the board and half by the PTA, at one school, and that school is Jefferson.
I do not push a mop anymore. I unfreeze the pipes, run the boiler, fix what the contract does not cover, and I am in that hallway at seven fifteen when the walkers come in.
The closet is still the closet. Bigger now, and the line item is eleven hundred dollars, because Doreen went and got more money and did not tell me.
Principal Voss is still there. She has not apologized and I do not expect her to, and I say good morning to her every day, because there are four hundred children in that building watching how the adults do it.
She told me nobody pays me to be the school mascot. There has been a line in a PTA budget since 2011 that pays six hundred dollars a year for exactly what she was talking about, and every adult in that building has voted for it and not one of them knew what they were voting for.