Last year alone, custodial services went through 17,500 gallons of floor wax, cleaned 139,000 desks, refinished 140 gym floors, tended 3,000 acres of grass and maintained the 6,500 classrooms.
Job security
The halls of Watkins Mill High School can be quiet, if not downright lonely, on the nights when 52-year-old Michael Ray wraps up the night shift, checking the locks, setting alarms, spotting any leftover mess that his 10-man crew might have missed.
He locks up, his huge keychain jingling as he strides the tile floor for the umpteenth time. Then the morning crew is in by 6:30 the next morning, the night crew by 2:30. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It's a routine nearly 20 years going. Since the 1,800-student school opened, Ray has seen teachers and principals come and go; he's seen generations of students grow up and graduate, including his own three; and he's seen the building expand — with the intimate knowledge of its grub and grime that only a janitor can have.
It has attached him to more than just the building.
"I enjoy the job. Being around the kids helps keep you young, keep you energized and stuff. It's a good job. We got good benefits; we have good security, so I plan on staying here for a while," he said laughing in his closet-sized office in the building's basement. "… I like it here. I like the people here. I like the kids that come through here; it's a very diverse school, you have a lot of different cultures here. It's just a nice place to work. And even with the new people coming in, leaving, whatever, I've always found that it's been a good school."
For the custodial staff, there is no summer vacation. He and his crew set to the summer cleaning regimen on the first Monday after school lets out. At the top of priorities: stripping and re-waxing the tile floor. Then they set to sanitizing the school's 28 bathrooms, scrubbing out the stairwells — even blotting up fingerprints on glass and scraping off those pesky little pieces of tape stuck to the walls from students hanging signs and posters.
During the school year, add the occasional mess of a student throwing up, even once when "somebody did something on the bathroom floor." But that's to be expected, he says — not that he'd ever complain.
"Nothing really burns now because I done seen it all. We have to do it," he says. "And when I see the kids messin' up, I just tell myself, ‘That's job security' — as long as they make a mess, I got a job."
Six days to spruce
By the time this school year officially began, Bill Hicks, building services manager at Wheaton High School, was practically in mid-year form.
For the first time in his 19 years at Wheaton, there was daytime summer school, with more than 1,300 students occupying nearly every classroom until the program ended Aug. 8.
That gave Hicks, who has worked for MCPS for 46 years, just six days to spruce up the school before teachers arrived Aug. 19.
So he and his staff of 16 worked overtime Aug. 9 and 10 to clean the classrooms, wax the floors and fix one group of students' mess so another could tear it all down in a couple weeks.
"At first, it's nice to see the kids come in that first day," said Hicks, a burly, imposing figure, despite his soft Virginia drawl. "But those freshmen come in rough. The other kids, they have been here before, but the freshmen are out to prove something."
Hicks, who often walks to the Dalewood Drive campus from his nearby home, arrives each day at 4:50 a.m. to seize control of the building he knows so well. He said he has never taken a vacation longer than two days because he is fearful of the work that would await his return.
Despite the early start to the back-to-school season, he knows the bulk of the work will come after the students arrive, mainly because a teenager's behavior is one of the few things Hicks can't predict after all these years.
"You used to be able to tell kids to stop messing around," Hicks said. "Now, they'll turn around and tell you what to do."
The feeling is mutual
"The staff thinks the world of her," Grundy said. "She takes a great deal of pride in the schools."
This will be Rossie's seventh year as Brookhaven's building service manager; she has been with the school system for 16 years. She served as assistant building service manager at Fairland before moving to Brookhaven and began as a building service employee at Highland View Elementary.
"I think people would be surprised to know how long it takes to get a school ready from start to end," Rossie said. "It's no easy task."
Tools of the trade
The floors of Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School in Wheaton are spotless—not a skid mark or glop of dust in the entire building.
But by the end of the first day of classes yesterday, all of Andrew Williams' hard work as building manager could have been erased by throngs of middle school students and whatever messes they made.
"One of 'em could have their new ‘Kmart specials' shoes and skid on the floor," said Williams, 54. "Or spill a Coke. Or have an accident."
In fact, Williams, who works the night shift, has had his share of cleaning up "accidents" — in the bathroom or elsewhere — in his 15 years at the school.
"You just gotta put your gloves on, get your mop and clean it up," he said as if pep-talking himself.
It's one of his many duties. In the days before the first bell rang, he also plucked gum from under tables, dusted blinds, washed windows and moved any heavy file cabinet a teacher might need.
But, he said, cleaning's what he knows how to do.
"The broom, the dust mop, the buffing machine — I got it all trained," he brags.
And although it may get tedious sometimes, Williams prides himself on his mantra.
"You just have to enjoy what you're doing," he said.
