You be the detective and check out the TDSB

The Toronto Star has launched School Work , a project that allows readers parents, teachers, students and others to look at how money is being spent in Torontos aging public schools. Find your school at School Work . Tell us if you think too much is being spent on some jobs. Tell us what jobs need doing to make your school a better, safer learning environment.

Remember the $143 pencil sharpener installation? Thats where the idea came from.

Two years ago, the Star told you that Canadas biggest school board was wasting precious dollars on construction and maintenance. The sharpener was one of thousands of examples. In that case, taxpayers were charged $143 for a Toronto District School Board carpenter to drive to the school to attach the sharpener to a classroom wall with four tiny screws.

We also told stories of the school board paying $190 to replace a toilet seat. Paying $2,442 to mount a $127 whiteboard on a wall. Then there was the electrical outlet $3,000 to put a new plug in a library. That new plug took four hours to install, but taxpayers were billed for 76 hours of labour (almost $3,000), which sources say was done to account for the time of idle workers who had no assignments that week.

View 2 photos

The Star has now obtained and analyzed three years of school board work orders, providing them to the public with simple search functions online at thestar.com . It is a rare chance to examine and comment on how your dollars are spent. In a school board that includes seven schools built in the 1800s, and many more that are 50, 60, or 70 years old, there is lots of work to do. Painting, landscaping, carpentry, wall repairs, electrical repairs, graffiti removal, leaky roofs, water fountain fixes and many more jobs. The ice storm was not kind to schools, and many leaky roofs and crumbling ceilings still need work.

Since the Star first broke the story two years ago, the school board, with the help of strong consultant reports, made some changes, though problems still exist. We spoke recently to Angelos Bacopoulos, chief facilities manager for the TDSB. The veteran public servant is well aware that the province has estimated it will cost $3.1 billion to bring Torontos 600-plus schools into proper, workable, safe condition.

He has an annual budget of about $80 million to tackle it and has joked that he feels like the story of the Little Dutch Boy, so awash is the school board in repair issues.

Bacopoulos said his team has achieved the following:

In August, the school board will attempt to renegotiate its contact with the council of unions the Maintenance and Construction Skilled Trades Council, led by Jimmy Hazel which has a hammerlock on all work done for public schools in Toronto. Even if an outside contractor is brought in to do work the council members cannot do, the contractor has to pay special union dues to the council. That contract expired more than a year ago but the Liberal government extended it to August 2014.

Here is the original post:
You be the detective and check out the TDSB