Custodians from hell
Okay, so I just went back into my classroom, and the first thing that comes to mind that is not incredibly profane is:"Rowrbazzle! TANSTAAFL! Mule Fritters! Dingo Kidneys! Rackin'-frackin' son of a mule-skinner!"
Yes, apparently the custodial staff had been hard at work in my room-- listening to music on my radio, watching music videos on the classroom tv, and dumping my things in a big pile in the middle of the room and OUT IN THE HALL.
When I left school in June, I had put away almost everything. A summer school class spent part of the term in my room, and I assured my friend who was teaching in there that she could use whatever she wanted, but I KNOW she didn't leave things out to just be thrown around. Strangely, there is a diagram of my room drawn on the chalkboard, which states where everything WAS when they took out the furniture to do the once-a-year floor cleaning (oooohh, gross!), but apparently it was just put there for artistic purposes, since they didn't actually USE the diagram to put anything BACK. It looks like a tornado hit that room-- and I KNOW whereof I speak. And my fan is missing.
Oh. And they broke my chair. Irretrievably. The leather one I paid for myself, that replaced the cracked pumpkin-colored plastic one that I inherited.
This is not the first instance of this type of fun. I had a window that would not latch when I moved in. It had been like that for over five years and two previous occupants. Countless work orders had been placed on this bad boy, which resulted after four visits from three different custodians, in some nice shiny duct tape (or, as the maintenance supervisor calls it "duck" tape) being slathered across the two panes like braces on a twelve-year-old. But I guess I shouldn't complain too much about that one-- another colleague swung her window open... and watched it slowly pirouette away from the frame like Frank Poole's corpse in 2001: A Space Odyssey and plummet three stories to the ground. When the custodian finally came to the room, he looked through what was now a insect portal in her wall and said, and I quote, "Hey. The window's broken." I actually heard my friend's knuckles crack like microwave popcorn as she clenched her fists.
Combine that with the wires hanging from my ceiling, the broken clock with the cracked plastic cover and the 3'x2' obsolete intercom system with yet another clock that hasn't worked since 1967 but yet somehow still has been left to adorn the walls and you've got a lovely refugee college student motif going on that would give Carson Kressley a fit of the vapors.
At my previous school, it was not this way. If a table needed to be removed, two guys and a dollie showed up within the hour. The floors were actually swept every day. Teachers were not expected to provide their own classroom clocks, batteries, or surge protectors on top of the million other things upon which we spent our own money. It didn't take three sullen, hard-bitten men two days to bring up a box of paper from the first floor. The maintenance supervisor didn't go out
It took me two years in my new school to learn the following things:
1. If you want something done, wait for the night crew to come on duty and ask Louise. Louise will actually get it done, and call you "darlin'," too.
2. If you can't wait for Louise, email the work order to the maintenance supervisor and CC the principal.
3. If it weighs less than two hundred pounds, move it yourself.
So now I will spend about 4 hours rearranging my room.
But, by God, someone's buying me a new chair. One as nice as the maintenance supervisor's.
posted by "Ms. Cornelius" @ 5:52 PM
16 Comments:
Sorry about your chair. I've had things walk out my door too. Last year I took digital pictures of things so I had proof they were in my room in May at the end of the year.
Oh my, we have jewels as custodians. I am so sorry. And the chair, that just takes the cake.
I have had it when I have turned the radio on, that someone had been listening to a different station than I would. But that is pretty minor.
With that mess, I'd go with the profane. I, too am very blessed with a superb custodial staff. They do have a summer crew, though and sometimes things go missing. My department shares an "art cart" that we use for projects. When we came in this week to scope out our rooms, we noticed that we've got "art", but no cart. Cart go bye-bye. It seems this can happen even when things are liberally labeled with masking tape and Sharpied room numbers.
What a sucky story! Hope it gets rewritten for a happy ending--with a new chair to boot!
Sorry to hear about that.
It's incredible what some people get away with. Maybe on your next column advising new teachers you could suggest bribes to the custodians and the bookroom attendants, as they're apparently the people running the school.
I'm so sorry -- especially about the chair. I'd come and help you put it all back together if I could.
One year, we came back to find that everyobody's classroom stuff had apparently been shoved into the hall at the same time so the summer staff could do the classroom floors in one fell swoop. There must have been thought put into shoving everything back into the wrong rooms -- my stuff was scattered in rooms all up and down the hall -- six or seven doors away from my own room. The nicely waxed floors were a mass after we shoved everything back where it belogned.
Good gravy. No WONDER our educational system is in such disarray. How can kids be expected to actually, I don't know, LEARN when their classrooms are crumbling around them? And how the hell are you supposed to teach when people steal your stuff? Ridiculous.
IF I was you, I would put in a financial request for your principal to buy you a new chair, of your choosing. No way you should put up with such crap!
I plan to visit my classroom next week to see what it is like after being used for summer school.
Speaking of maintainance, when I taught on the Navajo Rez, our maint. dept. actually stapled a plastic bag over a leaking ceiling cooling duct (the principal of that school found a 'large' balloon of water over his desk the next am and managed to move his desk before it erupted all over it) AND, in the teacherage, our maint. people actually used a blow torch to looses some gas pipes. Somehow, maybe having had the right ceremony performed, no one blew up.
Have a GOOD start to your school year!
Are you sure you don't work in my school district? My second year of teaching, my husband bought me a tool box and I was given a little vaccuum cleaner. When we got back from Christmas break, my room had been "broken" into, even though there were no signs of forced entry. Both of those items were the only two items stolen! It was a bit suspicious.
(I seriously feel your pain and hope that there's some resolution to your broken chair.)
I've had fantastic custodians at both of my schools--but one year we "renovated" and my microwave, clock, pencil sharpener, and teacher's edition (yes, weird) all disappeared from the "safe" room they were stored in. Totally frustrating as I was only in my 2nd year of teaching and couldn't afford to replace any of it--and really, it was an horrible pencil sharpener!
(I'm also sitting on a broken chair--the wheel now falls off whenever you shift sideways...)
Thanks for the sympathy. It helps lower the BP.
It's just the custodians in this building. I keep saying I'm going to kidnap the maintenance supervisor at my old building and make him clean house at our high school.
To me, if they've got time to change my radio and watch videos on the tv, they've got time to put the room back into some semblance of order.
Oh, and I'm getting a new chair. COUNT on it.
Contractors are literally removing the roof from our building, to create a design flaw which caused constant roof leaks and a terrible mold problem. We will be opeing late this fall as a result. last week I drove by and the sun was shining down into my classroom.
I can't wait to see what it's like when I get back...
Opposite side of the US, same problems.
I've actually come into my classroom in the evening to find the following:
- custodian on my computer
- custodian's children drawing on my whiteboard with my markers (no wonder the tips kept getting smashed... and I kept blaming my AVID kids!)
- custodian ASLEEP ON THE FLOOR while her children jumped from desk to desk and banged on my keyboard
- custodian watching my TV (I disconnected it after this, since I never turn the darn thing on anyway.)
I actually joked with another person from custodial/maintenence that we should start drawing chalk outlines on the floor every place we've found the custodian asleep (she sleeps in many classrooms, apparently--not just mine.)
I do know she's working two jobs, but I hate to say it--there's a minimum work standard, and she's not doing it.
Our maintenence supervisor, however, is also our tech supervisor, and not only does nothing ever get done with him, but... let's just say that I've kinda burnt my bridges with him many times over.
And I have his daughter in my honors freshman class this next year. Ought to be interesting. Fortunately, I've met her, and she seems like a nice kid. Maybe since she'll be in my class, I can actually get stuff taken care of in my classroom (I had a broken window for most of last winter that finally got fixed in April. It was broken because it had been painted closed at some point, and on a 100F day early last fall, a student tried in un-airconditioned desperation to open it and managed to break it. So lovely.)
And on a side note, I can't believe that even with CAPCHA (the word identification w/ commenting), you still get comment spam. Ick.
QD: Sing with me now: "Sunshiiiiiine on my shouuuuuulders makes me happyyyyyyyyyyy; Sunshiiiiiiiine in my eyyyyyyyeeeees can make me cryyyyyyyyyy....."
Hope it doesn't rain there in Jersey while your roof is AWOL.
la maestra: The year I had a board member's kid in my class, EVERYTHING got repaired in my room, and suddenly I had heat. It was great. Our maintenance supervisor apparently doesn't know how to use a computer. But his staff DOES know how to check out betting sites on MY computer while they're working feverishly to screw my room up.
And about the Spam: What the HELL was THAT? I think I'll leave it up just to amuse myself, but -- Golly!
In our school, it's the subs who keep doing bad things with our computers...
Our principal has placed this message on the signboard out front for the summer:
"When you have no roof, the sky's the limit."
A nice optimistic take on what's going to be a hairy fall, I fear...
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