Doesn't Cost Nothing

Every veteran educator I know has a wry joke about the month of May. You know, the 90 days of May. Bloated with capstone activities, testing, commencement, the crescendo of enthusiasm, and, for some, dread for summer break, May is cacophonous, exhilarating, exhausting. One of my teacher pals at the the big PreK - 12 school where I began my career bragged that he could subsist entirely on event food during May. The juniors I taught at that same school experienced May as the last forced march of college resume building. They hunched over their exams trying to tune out the seniors who were noisily celebrating their last days of high school. One of my head of school mentors warned me, only two things should come out of the head's mouth in May: "thank you" and "I'm sorry." An excellent throw away line that turned out to be hella good advice.

Since readership plummets, understandably, during May, I'm taking liberty to write about a meaningful but arcane aspect of school operations that is highlighted during the last month or two of the year. I imagine you reading it in late June when the dust has finally settled on the school year and you are cleaning out your inbox. That subject, I say, is the complicated intersection of facility maintenance and events. One of the central tensions in facilities work is the presence of events, as the labor they require invariably falls to the facilities team. In even the biggest, most sophisticated independent schools, however, the cost for this labor, and even more importantly, the opportunity cost, is rarely accounted for. 

In large universities, conversely, these costs are transparent. The facilities team bills inter-departmentally, effectively viewing the other departments at the institution as clients. When Georgetown holds its commencement activities, for instance, the facilities department bills the student affairs office hundreds of thousands in labor and materials. This strategy creates a kind of check and balance and a sober-minded approach to events--or at least prompts somebody to ask, do we really need the Blue Angels flying in formation over the proceedings?

In independent schools, however, event set up and breakdown costs are hidden as are the opportunity costs associated with them. The tacit assumption is that the facilities team has nothing better to do at any given moment than to set up a jillion chairs and tables. And, no one accounts for the fact that the event, bloating year by year, erodes more and more of the time the facilities team needs for preventative maintenance, the least heralded of all facilities work, whose value is only recognized at failure--when the AC goes out in September in Huntsville. 

Interdepartmental billing in even the largest independent schools would probably be over the top, but it is worth tracking the real cost of events. Most Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (the work order systems most schools now employ) allow the team to categorize and track the time they spend on individual work orders. Analysis of this data helps facility directors to plan ahead, to identify problematic locations, to schedule routine and preventative maintenance, and to push back a little, to help the Director of Advancement, for instance, see the real cost of the alumni gathering that has gotten more elaborate each year, or conversely, to advocate for more personnel. That is, if the school believes that its events lineup provides essential value, then the team must grow to make them possible AND still attend to the schedule of preventative maintenance.

I would argue that a good facility director lives in a constant state of productive paranoia and uses the kind of cost-benefit data I describe as a proxy measure of success. "Doesn't cost nothing" was the refrain of an excellent facility director I was fortunate to hire. He had other versions: "The only person crying at the ribbon cutting is the facility director." Do a post-mortem on May with your facility director this summer. Unpack it and examine it through the lens of real and opportunity costs.