District considers cutting cafeteria-worker hours

Cotati-Rohnert Park school district officials want to lay off the equivalent of 12½ full-time cafeteria workers and hire nine of them back at reduced hours with no benefits, a move intended to save about $150,000 a year.

District Superintendent Robert Haley said the decision was forced when the district lost a customer for which it used to prepare food — Bellevue Union School District. That widened a deficit in the district’s $1.6 million cafeteria budget, he said.

“It’s absolutely unfortunate, but the cafeteria fund can only afford so much,” he said. “This isn’t anything that anyone’s excited about.”

The cafeteria workers, many of whom have put in well over a decade at the district, said they were bewildered by the proposal.

“After working there for so many years, it feels rotten the way they’re doing it,” said Karen Sladowski, a food service worker who is a 26-year veteran of the district’s lunchrooms.

Sladowski said she works 7½-hour days and, after paying a little over $300 toward her medical benefits, brings home $1,400 a month.

The district has to offer partial benefits to any cafeteria worker who works more than four hours a day. It plans to hire back laid-off or new, replacement employees at 3.7 hours a day, removing that obligation.

“To cut everybody down to 15 minutes below where you could actually buy insurance is to me just so disrespectful,” Sladowski said. “Most of those women work their butts off. It’s a disgrace.”