South Bend schools will end contract with SSC Services for Education

SOUTH BEND — The South Bend Community School Corp. will terminate its contract with facilities management company SSC Services for Education, and the district's maintenance work will be insourced moving forward.

Since January 2022, SBCSC's buildings, maintenance, custodial services and landscaping have been contracted out to SSC, when the board approved the plan to outsource these services in a 5-2 vote taken at the end of 2021.

But at a meeting on Monday, March 17, the school board voted unanimously to authorize the district to terminate the contract between SSC and SBCSC. Ahnaf Tahmid, SBCSC's chief financial officer, said the current plan is to give SSC a letter of termination on March 31, after which there will be a 90-day grace period as stipulated in the contract before the relationship officially ends on July 1.

Following that, Tahmid said, the goal will be to insource the positions that had been contracted out.

"It is in our best financial interests that we hire people on our own, we take care of our buildings on our own," he said, adding that the contract with SSC is currently worth approximately $20 million.

At a board meeting in January 2025, Tahmid presented a breakdown of building and grounds operations and maintenance expenditures from 2018 to 2024. Between 2021, the year before SSC was hired, and 2022, when its contract began, there was an increase of about $7 million, Tahmid said.

There have also been annual increases each year since 2021, which Tahmid said "can be explained by inflation and (other) costs." Between 2022 and 2023, there was an increase of over $3 million, and between 2023 and 2024, an increase of around $220,000. The total increase across all three years is more than $10 million.

On Monday night, Tahmid said terminating the contract doesn't necessarily mean the district will be saving $7 million going forward, due to inflation and "some structural change and hierarchical change." But he did give a conservative estimate that SBCSC will save $3million-$5 million, or an average of $4 million, in operational expenditure each year by insourcing the work.

"We also believe that this project will definitely help us improve the quality of service of the custodial services that are being offered to our buildings and to the kids and to the teachers and all the staff," Tahmid said.

He added that he, Acting Superintendent Mansour Eid and board attorney Peter Agostino recently met with SSC leadership to let them know that SBCSC was considering terminating the contract, and SSC came back with two offers contingent on the district retaining SSC's services until at least June 30, 2026.

The first offer, Tahmid said, entailed a $1.5 million annual cost reduction in the contract, while the second also included an additional $2 million annual reduction. But, he said, this additional reduction would have been done through "scope adjustments," which meant SSC might have reduced the number of custodial employees at SBCSC buildings or lowered the frequency of cleanings.

"This was our strong recommendation that we do not do any kind of scope adjustments, because that might make us vulnerable to a deterioration in quality of service, and we cannot let that happen for the betterment of our kids and for the staff and all the teachers," Tahmid said. "… Insourcing is the best financial decision that we could make, and I'm glad that the board made the right decision unanimously."

In October 2024, SSC won a national Green Star Award from the Professional Grounds Management Society (PGMS) for its work on SBCSC's athletic fields, marking the first time a K-12 district had won a grand prize in the award's 52-year history. The district won in the program's Athletic Fields category, competing with high schools, colleges and semi-professional teams from across the country.

Trustee Mark Costello, however, praised the motion to terminate the contract, calling the current situation "a rip-off."

"If we're real serious about what a custodial staff does in this school corporation and under the old way (insourcing the positions) compared to what we had for the last few years, there's no comparison," he said. "… Once I got on the board and saw what we had compared to what we had in the past, this is what I've been working on, and thank God, we finally got it."

Tahmid also expressed relief that the board approved the termination, adding that the decision was "historic."

"Approximately $4 million will definitely happen in terms of our operational building expenditure (by insourcing), so that will be huge; $4 million was approximately the total amount of raise we gave to our teachers the last time we negotiated with them," he said. "So definitely, that will help us a lot and help us be more efficient. … I'm glad that all the board members and the administration are on the same page."

Email South Bend Tribune education reporter Rayleigh Deaton at [email protected].