The custodians at Franklin High School have become familiar faces in our community; known by shared smiles while passing in the halls or lively conversations about their pet goats. While they may not be personally known by every student at Franklin, the custodial staff are vital members of our community, as they not only keep our school clean but also properly functioning.
Ten custodians are currently assigned at Franklin to maintain the entirety of the school, which expands over 200,000 square feet. Rob Carron, Franklin’s head custodian, coordinates repairs with maintenance workers, orders supplies, and leads the custodial staff as a whole. Tim Roberts directly works with Carron to manage the building during the day, focusing on cleaning up after breakfast and lunch as well as any messes that need to be immediately dealt with. The more intensive cleaning of the school is done each night by seven full-time night custodians and one part-time night custodian. To be able to clean such a large building every night, the custodial staff splits the entire school into sections, where each custodian is responsible for cleaning any rooms or bathrooms in their specified area. Before cleaning their assigned sections, they start each shift by cleaning the kitchen as a team.
It is important for them to start by cleaning the kitchen as it is one of the areas around the school labeled as a “red zone.” These “red zones” indicate that the room must be swept, vacuumed, or mopped every day — regardless of the number of staff working that night. Beyond the kitchen, some of these “red zones” include the headstart rooms, the health clinic, and special education classrooms.
On Feb. 6, 2024, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 140 — which represents both custodians and nutrition services employees in our district — came to a signed agreement on a new contract with Portland Public Schools (PPS). This new contract will lead to changes for custodians working at Franklin, as they get pay raises — starting at a 6% increase plus a step to a higher pay rate within the established salary range for their position. Additionally, the updated contract gives custodians the right to request reprimands, for things such as tardiness, be removed from personnel files after two years if the violation is not repeated — this keeps past write-ups from being a barrier to promotion. It also ensures the right for union representatives to speak at public school board meetings. Jennifer Borely, a SEIU steward and current night custodian at Franklin, describes how while working on the SEIU bargaining team they, among other things, advocated for inclement weather pay. Previously, custodians have been required to come in to work regardless of extreme weather, natural disasters, or poor air quality. Borely describes how this meant, “custodians were still required to come to work unless we felt that coming is an extreme danger to our lives. And then we can use our vacation pay or emergency pay to cover those hours.” This standard was changed and the new agreement guarantees all staff who can get to their schools during inclement weather closures will be paid 1.5 times their base rate of pay for all hours worked.
Anthony Morales, a night custodian who has been working at Franklin for two months, describes how some of the night custodians’ daily tasks include sanitizing major touch points of their sections as well as “going around and dealing with the trash, cleaning bathrooms, sweeping, and mopping.”
The night custodians come in every night to clean Franklin, after a day of students filling the halls, classrooms, and bathrooms with, “a whirlwind of a mess,” as Morales describes it. At the end of each night, Morales has found one of his favorite parts of the job is to see the difference that the custodians make to the school environment. “I really enjoy the [feeling of] before [versus] after work, and seeing and realizing the impact you have most nights.”
Franklin custodians’ daily tasks are often changed by events that take place at Franklin, which must be cleaned up after. For example, whenever a sports game is happening in the gym, priorities shift to cleaning up garbage, spills, and anything else that is left over. While cleaning up after these games is vital for classes taking place in the gym building to function the next day, the extreme messes can impact the custodian’s ability to clean the rest of the school. Borely cites an example of a recent basketball game, explaining, “We went there at 9:30, we’re off [work] at 11:30. That’s two hours of cleaning that we didn’t get done in our sections because we had to go over to the gym and [clean].”
Borely describes how understaffing of custodians across PPS has prompted custodial staff to adapt. Now fewer custodians must clean the same area of their schools without the staff numbers it would require to do so sustainably and intensively. At Franklin, the understaffing of custodians impacts how much time the custodians have to finish all the work across the school, which means there is less time to be thorough in order to cover all areas. Borely describes how all high schools in PPS are labeled as “overstaffed” by the district and this allows PPS to “pull [custodians] out of the high schools, in case there are absences in the other schools.”
PPS describes how in this context, the term “overstaffed” does not necessarily mean these high schools have more custodians than needed. Instead they “overstaff” high schools to be able to fill vacancies in schools within their cluster, with staffing ratios that depend on student enrollment and square footage. This means that even if in actuality high schools are low in staffing numbers, Borely describes how, when it is needed, they pull Franklin custodians into “the K-8 feeder schools to Franklin if there is a custodian that has had an emergency, is out sick, or takes their vacation time.” Borely emphasizes how filling in these roles is vital for these other schools to continue to run during these absences as “you can’t not get the garbage, you can’t not clean the bathrooms.”
However, the responsibilities of the specified sections the night custodians have to cover do not change even as the number of custodians’ working fluctuates. Borely notes, “If they pull one of us [to work in another school] and someone’s out sick, now you have four and a half people to clean a school.” Borely describes how understaffed nights are sometimes nicknamed “trash and dash days.” Meaning when custodians are spread out thin, they only have enough time to clean the bathrooms and get the trash out of the school.
Daily cleaning can also be interrupted due to student vandalism. Borely explains that vandalism throughout the building is fairly commonplace. According to PPS policy, custodians are expected to immediately remove any graffiti that appears to be gang-related, racially slurred, or offensive which also takes away the custodians’ time from focusing on cleaning the rest of the school. But Borely highlights how the vandalism that negatively affects the school the most is the direct property damage, especially in the bathrooms. “The kind of vandalism that I think hurts [students] more than anything else, is the kind of vandalism where toilet paper dispensers get ripped off of the stalls or paper towel dispensers get ripped off the walls.”
This not only makes a mess of the bathrooms, but it can also have bigger implications. Currently, one of the boys’ bathrooms has been closed off for about a month, Borely explains this has happened because “someone attempted to rip the sink off the wall, and it actually broke plumbing further down the [pipe] and was leaking into a classroom on the other side of the school.” They’ve since had to cut the water in that boys’ bathroom to stop the leakage and consequently shut the bathroom off from use.
Morales has found in his time working at Franklin, “The few that vandalize really make a mess of the school at times — especially in the bathroom — [but] the majority of everyone really respects the school.” Some members of our community have shown their appreciation for Franklin’s custodians in their own ways. Recently the athletics department gifted the custodial staff a variety of snacks and each a zip-up hoodie as a thank you for their hard work maintaining and cleaning the gym during a busy basketball season of tournaments and games. This feeling of appreciation from staff and students alike is felt throughout the custodial staff. “I don’t think I’ve ever come across a staff member who hasn’t thanked me for the job that I do,” Borely notes.
However, Borely does remark that the Franklin community could better support custodians by putting up chairs at the end of the day. Because of the size of the dust mops they use to clean, Borely describes, “if the chairs are up, it’s a lot easier for us to get up and underneath a lot of the desks. It makes my job so much easier.”
Franklin custodians’ connection and appreciation in the Franklin community is evident even though much of their work is done out of the view of most students. When she isn’t enjoying listening to an audiobook as she makes her way throughout her section of the school, Borely has most enjoyed getting to talk to students. She has even gotten the reputation of being the custodian who is always happy to chat about her goats and will occasionally show lots of cute videos. “It’s okay to say hi to us and talk to us because some of us are actually kind of cool.”
