By Drew Pierson

Staff Writer

School restrooms can be dirty, they can have graffiti (just in case you wanted to know whether "Mike wuz here") and more than once someone has piled up the toilet paper at a Montgomery County school and lit it on fire, administrators say.

So it might not be a surprise that in a recent survey by Montgomery County Public Schools only half of elementary school students and a third of middle and high school students thought their bathrooms were "well supplied," and that those numbers have remained unchanged since 2003.

What might be a surprise is that MCPS has no real way of knowing at any given time how much each school is spending on those custodial supplies - toilet paper, soap, etc. - according to Dr. Marshall C. Spatz, director of MCPS' Department of Management, Budget and Planning.

"We know how much is spent for the system as a whole, but then the issue is how much is spent at each school?" Spatz said. "If we give them $10,000 do they spend the full amount?"

The school system's budget for custodial supplies is $1,738,000, but unlike textbooks, instructional supplies and other equipment, which are put in school-specific accounts, custodial supplies are put into a central fund, Spatz said. Therefore MCPS administrators do not know how much a school is spending (unless it goes over its budget), or how effectively it's spending at any given time.

The Montgomery County Council's Office of Legislative Oversight recently presented a budget review to the Council Education Committee on MCPS' "school plant operations," which include custodial activities and supplies.

"They [Council staff] felt it was not clear exactly how much had been spent on custodial supplies in each school," Spatz said.

But school administrators have a solution. While they may never fix the scourge of dirty toilets (98 percent meet inspection standards, they say), MCPS is implementing system-wide online financial management software that will make central office staff able to immediately check the finances of any school for any item - including custodial supplies.

"They have done a fabulous job," said County Councilman Mike Knapp, chairman of the Education Committee. "They have taken a very antiquated system and turned it into a very modern one in about 18 months."

The new system will go online in the next couple of weeks. Knapp said he anticipated much more reliable figures from MCPS after that, though he said the Council would want at least a year's worth of data to start discerning trends.

"It's great from a technological perspective, but it's also great for the rest of the county, especially the Council, when we take a look at [the data] for the budget," Knapp said.

The Council is so bullish on the new software, provided by Oracle, that it plans to start the process of implementing a modified version for itself once the kinks are worked out of MCPS' version.

"It's a big issue," Knapp said. "Hopefully we'll be able to get a county system up and running one day."