Out of 25 staff positions that need to be filled at Lafayette for next year, 14 openings are support staff positions.

These jobs include custodians, nutrition workers, bus drivers and assistant teachers, Associate Principal Mike Franklin said.

“There’s not as many people reaching out, and it’s just like everywhere else in the community, people aren’t working as much as they did,” Franklin said.

The biggest concern Franklin has are night-shift custodians and one administrative secretary position that opened in January.

“[Custodians and lunch workers] are hired at the district level and sent to where they’re needed most. The only position we have control over would be the administrative assistant,” he said.

Due to the lack of a senior office secretary, other office assistants have had to make up for the work.

“It kind of spreads the work out over all the secretaries with one person out. The senior class has a lot of things going on [2nd Semester],” secretary Laura Johnson said. “For me, it’s more about writing passes for the seniors because that class [office] can’t take any calls.”

Since Lafayette hadn’t been able to hire a secretary, with an opening for nearly four months, Rockwood took action to transfer a current support staff member in the district to Lafayette to fill the secretary position.

Crestview Middle School’s classroom assistant Lynn Teves will begin as Lafayette senior office secretary for the 2024-2025 school year.

“She’s transferred and will be coming over here. We’re very excited because we’ve filled that position for the senior secretary,” secretary Kerry Phillips said.

Rockwood has put forth more recruitment effort in hopes of increasing applications for support staff hired by the district.

“We have done job fairs, social media marketing, referral bonuses, classified ads and yard signs,” human resources coordinator Stacy Neely said. “We have also now entered into a recruiting campaign with television and radio.”

Recently hired as a custodian at Lafayette, Andrew Doyle says he has noticed a drastic decrease in custodial staff, making current work harder to complete.

“I previously worked at Crestview Middle School, and now I’m here,” he said. 

Doyle said Lafayette used to have a bigger crew, but now, with so many openings, it has been harder for the custodians to get things done.

“Tonight we’ve got two people. We used to have somewhere around five or six,” Doyle said.

At the high school level, Lafayette has combated the issue by hiring students and getting assistance from administrators.

“We do the best we can with what we have,” Franklin said. “You’ll see [administrators] cleaning the cafeteria every day and students working custodial positions for part-time money. We’ve also had some kids working in the lunchroom [in the past].”

Despite being understaffed, Lafayette and the district continue to make efforts to uphold support staff work.

“The [support staff] are part of the big machine here, they do a lot of the behind the scenes work,” Franklin said.