SSC Service Solutions, a Knoxville, Tennessee-based custodial and maintenance contractor for public school systems, is laying off 353 employees in Durham, North Carolina, at the end of next month.

The coming layoffs are a result of Durham County Public Schools ending its partnership with SSC. The school system outsourced its custodial service responsibilities to SSC 13 years ago in a $7 million-a-year contract and has decided to bring those services back within the school system.

The Durham school board voted last month to make the custodians employees and to spend an additional $1.1 million in their compensation.

As a result, 100 full-time employees and 253 part-time employees of SSC will be terminated. The terminations will be effective May 31, one week before the final day of the school system’s 2017-2018 school year.

Those SSC employees will have to apply for jobs with Durham County Public Schools to become employees.

The layoffs were filed with the N.C. Department of Commerce, in accordance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which requires companies to give a 60-day public notice of mass layoffs.

That filing came just nine days before SSC terminated 105 of its custodial employees in Rocky Mount, N.C. Those layoffs also resulted from a loss of contract, in this case with Nash-Rocky Mount Public Schools.

Those two losses of contract have resulted in 458 SSC employees being laid off in 2018, both in North Carolina. As a whole, North Carolina has seen 3,707 employees laid off through WARN notices in 2018.

North Carolina’s 2018 WARN summary can be found here.