Moskowitz Grills Officials on Toilet Paper Shortage

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The New York Sun

Forget textbooks and teacher training. Toilet paper was the subject of the day at City Hall yesterday.


With tension palpable in the City Council chambers, the chairwoman of the council’s Committee on Education, Eva Moskowitz, grilled the chief executive of the office of school support services, Marty Oestreicher, and the deputy chancellor for finance and administration, Kathleen Grimm, on what she sees as “unacceptable” shortages of toilet paper, paper towels, and soap in public schools.


The officials insisted in their opening statements that schools are stocked with plenty of the basic toilet supplies.


Ms. Moskowitz, who said she’s received hundreds of complaints from parents about bathroom supplies, didn’t buy their argument. She fired through a list of questions, which the representatives of the Department of Education answered concisely.


Question: Should paper towels, toilet paper, and soap be available to students? Answer: Yes.


Question: How important are they? Answer: Essential.


Question: What should a student do if they’re lacking? Answer: Tell the principal, who would tell the custodian, who would supply it.


Question: Are you aware that parents are asked to provide backup supplies? Answer: No.


Question: Are you familiar with Web sites like Craigs list, which include requests by desperate teachers looking for bathroom supplies? Answer: No.


Ms. Moskowitz, unconvinced, spoke of her own trips to the drugstore to buy backup supplies for her older son’s Manhattan elementary school.


“Teachers are looking for philanthropy, for charity, for their kids,” she said.


The department couldn’t explain why schools would be asking parents to make toilet-paper runs to Duane Reade and CVS. “We can’t comment. We have no idea,” Ms. Grimm testified. “The schools are stocked.”


Ms. Moskowitz said she was also troubled by the idea of the emergency backup supplies of bathroom essentials that are stockpiled in each borough. She said the need for emergency stockpiles shows there’s something wrong with the procurement system.


“We’re not talking about uranium,” she said. “We’re talking about toilet paper.”


“Which is a very important supply,” Ms. Grimm shot back.


“I don’t have an emergency supply of toilet paper in my home,” Ms. Moskowitz retorted.


“I do,” Ms. Grimm said, tersely.


When Ms. Moskowitz suggested trying to “fix the kinks in the system that are obviously occurring,” Ms. Grimm snapped that she didn’t know what language she had to speak to convey to the committee what’s happening in school bathrooms.


“I don’t know what language I have to speak,” Ms. Moskowitz replied. “Denying reality is not going to get us closer to solving the problem. … Let’s move away from denying it. Let’s move toward solving it.”


By the end of the hearing, neither Ms. Moskowitz nor the education department officials backed down.


On the way back to the old Tweed Courthouse, Ms. Grimm told reporters that it’s fine to have a public hearing about toilet paper but that the problems are localized and easily solved by alert principals.


Ms. Moskowitz later said that after more than an hour of testimony, she didn’t know who’s at fault: the department, school custodians, or unruly children who are playing with toilet paper instead of using it for its intended purpose.


Even if the children are misusing the paper, she said, it doesn’t make sense for principals to give an executive order not to stock bathrooms with toilet paper.


“We have to address those behavioral problems, not deny them toilet paper,” she said, adding that denying children toilet paper might be a “violation of the Geneva Convention.”


Later in the day, the toilet-paper debate kept rolling.


The president of the custodians union, Robert Troeller, fired off a statement accusing Ms. Moskowitz of trying to use hearings to “advance her career” rather than confronting more serious issues.


“Eva Moskowitz is grandstanding,” he said. “The New York City Council Education chairperson should spend the committee’s time and resources looking into the many serious funding issues facing the city Department of Education instead of trying to get publicity to help advance her career.”


Mr. Troeller said he was not invited to testify at the hearing because the union agrees with Mayor Bloomberg that there’s no problem.


Ms. Moskowitz said the union was welcome to testify.


“If they consider advocating on behalf of children grandstanding,” she said, “then I’m grandstanding and I fully admit to it.”


The president of the teachers union, Randi Weingarten, said the “shortage of bathroom supplies in schools is a complaint we constantly hear from teachers and parents.” But she said that even if the city fixes the problem, “The major problems facing the schools – attracting and retaining the best teachers, and lowering class size – will still remain.”


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