On a typical day at Northside, 1090 students, over 70 teachers, and numerous other staff and community members enter and exit the building. Every day, students and teachers alike walk on shiny waxed floors, enter tidy classrooms, eat on clean lunchroom tables, and use well-kept restrooms. 

Of course, our building does not magically clean itself before students arrive at 8:00. The upkeep of our building is all thanks to the Northside custodial staff. To find out more about the custodial staff and their role at Northside, The Hoofbeat interviewed Assistant Principal Mr. Barry Smith. 

The Typical Day of a Custodial Staff Member

The roles custodial staff perform generally fall into two categories: upkeep of the building during the day and cleaning the building after students leave. As of this year, Mr. Smith says, “We have one person here during the day. They start at 7 AM and they are here until 3:30 PM., predominantly on their own. That job during the day is taking care of the general cleanliness of the building.” 

Maintaining the building’s general cleanliness could include tasks ranging from cleaning the lunchroom to stocking bathrooms. Mr. Smith says, “one of the bigger buckets of work is the cafeteria.”

“When you put a thousand people…into a room, four periods in a row with no downtime, it’s going to get messy, and I don’t think people realize the amount of time that goes into cleaning that,” said Mr. Smith. 

Besides the cafeteria, the daytime custodial staff member also takes care of keeping other lunch areas clean, stocking the bathrooms, and even cleaning up unexpected messes. 

After Hours

Once school lets out at 3:04 PM, the after-school custodial staff team begins their shift. “We have a whole team that comes in at 3:00 PM and works until 11:30 PM every night,” says Mr. Smith. To best clean the messy building with a team of only five people, “the building is divided into sections, and everyone has their section that they clean.” The custodial staff will usually work until around 11:30, and often they are the ones to “turn off all the lights and secure [the building] at the end of the night”, says Mr.Smith. 

Not only are the custodial staff the last ones to leave the building each night, but they are typically here during other unusual hours. When the Northside building is open, the custodial staff needs to be here too. As “one of the busiest buildings in the school district,” according to Mr. Smith, this means custodial staff are often here on weekends, cleaning up after sports or rental use of the building.

In fact, custodial staff are here before the school year even starts. Mr. Smith says, “if you come into the building at the beginning of the year and look at the floors, they are highly shined and polished.” This is thanks to the custodial staff coming in over the summer to wax the floors in every room of this building. This task is among many other tasks in the “long-term maintenance of the building,” something many students may not regularly notice.

Student Action Matters

Although the custodial team works every day to ensure our building is the cleanest it can be, Northside students still have a responsibility to our learning environment.

Mr. Smith reflects on one of his earliest memories of students at Northside taking responsible action. “My second year working here, I was here for a weekend activity, and I was setting up the gym for PSAT testing. It was seven years ago, and I’m there by myself, setting up 120 tables, and then a group of students pokes their head in, looks confused, and leaves. And then, five minutes later, they come back asking, ‘do you want help?’”

This one story of student action is not an outlier. Mr. Smith says, “It’s been that way since the beginning of my time here.” Student action was even apparent at homecoming this year, and Mr. Smith says, “Student council did an amazing job of helping clean up.” 


“If everyone takes that extra little fraction of a second, it would make [the custodial staff’s] job just that much easier,” said Mr. Smith, a simple task to help Northside’s hardworking custodial team.