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After two votes rejecting a contract last month, the Memphis-Shelby County school board is bringing back a controversial custodial company to restore cleaning services to Northwest schools.
For the past three weeks, nearly 35 MSCS schools have been without janitorial services because of the stalled contract. The board voted 8-0 in an emergency meeting Thursday to rehire ABM Industries starting Feb. 1 through the remainder of the calendar year. Board members Stephanie Love, Tamarques Porter, Sable Otey, Keith Williams, and Joyce Dorse-Coleman changed their votes to get the contract through.
Several parents from Idlewild Elementary school, one of the buildings left without custodial services since the beginning of the year, pleaded during Thursday’s meeting for the board to adopt the contract. One parent said her son missed seven days of school in January because of unclean conditions during flu and virus season.
“He had the flu, and the flu turned into pneumonia,” Shelby Pearson, who has a 5-year-old at Idlewild, said Thursday. “Hold yourselves accountable. We are tired. We are fed up. This is deplorable.”
The MSCS board voted 5-2 to reject ABM’s contract in December and doubled down on that rejection weeks later, citing concerns about service quality from the company 10 years ago. It isn’t the first time cleaning contracts have caused issues for the district. The board had to fire the Northwest janitorial company in 2024 due to delayed worker payments and contract violations.
Board member Towanna Murphy, a critic of ABM, said she doesn’t want a repeat of that mistake. Murphy abstained from voting Thursday after listing at least nine school districts, including at least one in Tennessee, that fired ABM for poor performance in recent years.
“We have to make the right choice,” Murphy said. “That doesn’t mean we come from one incompetent company to another.”
Michelle McKissack, who represents a Northwest district where all schools were affected by the lapse in services, said she pushed the board to reconsider the contract after hearing multiple complaints from parents and teachers.
During public comment, Idlewild parents asked why the district didn’t have a backup option during the December votes. Pearson said the district should rely on MSCS employees to clean schools instead of having to adopt annual contracts with outside vendors.
“Why are we not providing permanent solutions to the problems we have?” she said.
In a meeting Tuesday, Interim Superintendent Roderick Richmond said administrators followed the contract policy correctly, offering a bid to ABM after a full search process in October. The board paid 50 building engineers and 123 cafeteria workers who volunteered to clean schools this month as a stopgap after the two contract rejections.
Board members said Tuesday that they want to change district policy to shift the timeline to the summer months so contract debates don’t happen in the middle of the school year. Several board members also pressed for more options in the beginning of the contract process.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include a line of context about the repeated contract vote.
Bri Hatch covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Bri at bhatch@chalkbeat.org.
