When I got a message this morning to call my guitar-slingin' compadre Steve Doyle, I figured he either had a line on a tavern gig for us, or he wanted to share some updated injury information for this week's Bears-Dolphins game.
Alas, I was wrong on both counts.
Stevie wanted to talk personal hygiene.
An hour earlier, while he was getting his lovely daughter ready for another day at CPS's Beaubien Elementary School, he did what most of us grade-school parents do on a daily basis with our own kids. He reminded his second-grader to brush her teeth and wash her hands and face.
That's when something clicked in his daughter's head and she dropped her Thursday morning bomb: "Did you know we haven't had any soap in our school bathrooms this week?"
Stevie hadn't been aware of that fact, so he called the school's front office and confirmed it. He then reached out to me.
I called the school roughly an hour later. I was told that the bathrooms had been soap-free this week, but was assured that a new shipment of soap arrived late Wednesday night.
I was also told that no one in the front office wanted to talk with me on the record.
CPS has been hearing complaints from parents, students and principals all over the city this fall about school cleanliness issues.
These complaints, no surprise, come hot on the heels of CPS having privatized the management of its school custodial services. Tim Cawley, the district's Chief Administrative Officer and the mastermind of the janitorial privatization plan, heard an earful about school cleanliness at September's Board of Education meeting. He vowed that Aramark, the company that won the contract, would soon be "flooding the zone" to address those problems.
Maybe it's time to flood Cawley's phone line with audio snippets from The Jarmels' 1961 hit, "A Little Bit of Soap."
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