We all go to school each day, walk the halls, sit in our classes, then go home. But there is one thing that not all of us notice: that is how clean everything is, our desks are wiped down, the floors are washed, and more. Not all of us stay late, but you will almost always see a custodian cleaning our school. A simple but important job, yet with the pandemic, they are now one of the reasons our school can stay open. Eric Gaertner, our new Head of Custodian,  said the amount of work they had has “doubled.”

Walking into school this year has been quite a different experience as we all came to see. There were many changes from pictures on the walls saying to “Wear a mask” and all those arrows on the floor. That’s nothing compared to our new classrooms with the new shields we have all over the place and the hand sanitizer stations. But the guys that had to set that all up was our own custodian team. Some of them worked long into the day as there was an ever-growing list of things that needed to be done around the school.

 “The weekend before school started I did 43 hours of overtime, I was not planning on that..” – Eric Gaertner (Head of Custodian)

Love or hate these changes we must give respect to our custodial team because without them, we would have to back fully online. Online school isn’t the easiest and I don’t think some of us want to go back to fully online. But when the day comes to take down all the barriers and bring back in all the desks, they will be the ones changing everything back to what it was. Our school is definitely lucky to have a team like this.