CHICAGO – Overflowing garbage, leaking ceilings, cockroaches, gnats and flies.

Those disgusting conditions are how many educators are describing Chicago’s public schools this year, the first of three under a $260 million contract the district signed with private custodial company Aramark February.

Courtesy: @drkugler

“It’s gross and disgusting and my health is being affected,” a teacher in a Southwest Side high school who asked not to be identified told the Huffington Post. “I want to be outside the minute I’m in here. It smells. Everything smells and I can’t focus. If I can’t focus to teach, how can kids focus to learn?”

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Michael Flynn, a sixth grade teacher at Otis Elementary in West Town told the news site he’s never seen school conditions as bad as they are this year. Piles of garbage sit overnight, or for several days, and floors and other surfaces have also gone uncleaned.

“It’s a germ factory,” he said. “And it’s as bad now as it’s ever been in terms of kids not getting what they need.”

The Southwest Side teacher contends that also includes basics like toilet paper.

“We’re running out of toilet paper,” he said. “I’m seeing more bugs than ever before. There’s overflowing trash that sits for days and weeks in some cases.”

Another teacher in the city’s South Shore neighborhood said she and her colleagues are buying soap and toilet paper for students because custodians are not keeping up on those supplies. Piles of classroom trash, inhabited by flies and gnats, are also the new norm, she said.

It’s not all hearsay from disgruntled teachers.

“Several recent surveys corroborate these conditions,” the Huffington Post reports. “A survey of about 230 CPS principals and administrators conducted by AAPLE, an arm of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, found that dirty schools have become common this year.

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“Another survey, conducted by the parent activist group Raise Your Hand CPS, found concerns with school cleanliness. And a Chicago Teachers Union survey conducted in June reports that maintenance problems were surfacing in the spring.”

Students, teachers and others have also documented the unclean conditions by snapping photos and posting them to Twitter with the hashtag #CPSfilth.

The reports come as officials with CPS, Aramark, and Service Employees International Union Local 1 – the union representing Aramark’s janitors – considered laying off 468 CPS janitors last month. Officials reduced that number to 290 and delayed the move until this month after a flurry of complaints at the district’s Sept. 24 board meeting, according to DNAinfo.com.

When Aramark took over the district’s custodial duties this spring, the company removed many janitors from specific schools and instead created a “floating pool” that travels from school to school.

The complaints about the district’s custodial services follows other complaints about school food, which is also contracted to the company. Moldy bread, rotten apples, and spoiled broccoli have been served to students since the company took over last year, one teacher at a South Side elementary school told the Huffington Post.

“I’m so nervous these kids will get sick,” she said. “It breaks my heart because these are kids at our school that in general we know are going home and not getting food at home. They’re getting kind of junk for a meal.”

CPS chief administrative officer Time Cawley, who pitched the contract with Aramark as one with quick responses “like Jimmy John’s” defended the company at the district’s September board meeting. He contends the “vast, vast majority” of CPS schools are as clean as ever.

But parent Jennie Biggs countered his assurances with a situation last month in which a student vomited on a rug in a classroom on a Friday, and the mess was still there when students returned the next week.

“They’re going through the motions,” she said. “It’s disturbing that people in the school are actually taking appropriate steps to try to get someone to address it, and they’re being ignored.”

The CPS communications department is headed by former Aramark employee Ron Iori, according to Catalyst Chicago.

Aramark spokeswoman Karen Cutler told the news site the company has added managers to help train CPS custodians at its own expense, and they’re doing their best.

“CPS, Aramark and SEIU Local 1 continue to work closely to make sure all CPS schools have appropriate custodial staffing levels to ensure clean schools,” she said.

Local SEIU president Tom Blanoff said he thinks that reducing upcoming janitorial layoffs will help the situation, as will “technological changes,” but if there continues to be problems CPS will need to hire more janitors.