Metro

We’re paying $14M to open a few locks

Lock and loaded!

The city plans to spend up to $14.5 million a year to have school custodians simply lock and unlock schoolyard gates.

As part of a PlaNYC initiative to give the public access to 290 schoolyards and give kids more open space by 2030, custodians get an extra $50,000 per school to cover annual expenses of opening the gates at 8 a.m. and closing them at dusk seven days a week.

While park advocates are happy the city is opening the playgrounds — the City Council reported in 2006 that 81 percent of yards were locked after school hours, relegating 1,170 acres of public land inaccessible — they bristle at the $50,000 price tag.

“It makes no sense,” said Geoffrey Croft, president of watchdog group New York City Park Advocates. “The custodians are already there during the school week, and they have to clean the schoolyard regardless. So they’re really just getting paid to open and close the gates.”

Croft pointed to the 269 already existing “joint operated playgrounds,” or schoolyards opened on weekends by Parks Department employees.

“Why can’t they do it that way?” he asked. “If you need more staff, take the $50,000 and hire employees who can open several gates.

“That money could be sent to the Parks Department, which desperately needs the money, to maintain many sites instead of flushing it down the toilet,” he added.

DOE spokeswoman Margie Feinberg explained that “the $50,000 is what it costs under our custodial contract to keep the yards open extra hours and for the extra cleanup and maintenance.”

The money goes to the custodian’s budget, not the school.

Councilwoman Gale Brewer, author of the 2006 council report and longtime advocate of opening schoolyards to the public, said there’s not enough Parks Department staff to jointly operate so many playgrounds and claimed that custodians “do a lot more than just open and close the gates.”

“After a weekend, there is a lot of cleanup to do,” she said. “They should be fairly compensated for that extra work.”

The Schoolyards to Playgrounds program was announced as part of Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC initiatives in 2007 and is part of the goal to have a park within a 10-minute walk of every New Yorker.

The DOE has converted a total of 91 playgrounds, although only 82 are currently open to the public because of unrelated capital projects, Feinberg said.

The custodian union did not return requests for comment.

angela.montefinise@nypost.com