Gretna High School has more than 150 people working on its staff, including teachers, administrators and others who help around the school in one way or another. Some of the least recognized staff members are the school’s custodians. GHS janitors work every day to keep the school clean. Despite their importance to the school environment, there are few of them. There are only five, in fact, and only three who currently work every night. It’s not easy to find janitors according to GHS’s principal, Todd Mueller, and it’s even harder to get them to work at the school when there are so many other schools nearby.
“There’s a variety of reasons why we’re short,” Mueller said. “It’s a lot of competitiveness with other districts. Other districts are the same, though, we’re not, like, this beacon of weirdness. We’re all fighting for this limited pool of people.”
Custodial jobs aren’t the only ones that are lacking occupants. They are, however, the ones that generate the most concern when they’re short.
“As far as [understaffing] goes, the areas we hear most about in the school are custodial,” Mueller said. “I also hear a lot about kitchen staff and paras. We’re always short on paras. So, it’s kind of all those that are called non-certified staff, meaning they have no teaching certificate.”
Problems arise when there is a shortage of workers. Fewer people can clean the school, so fewer tasks are completed.
“It puts everybody in a tougher spot,” Mueller said. “The custodians just can’t get to everything they normally would get to on a normal night, meaning they’re normally going to vacuum and they’re going to clean the boards and carry out the trash and wipe things down and clean the restrooms and do all these things. So you have to start prioritizing some of the things that don’t get done. Vacuuming the classrooms is one of the first ones that goes away.”
Competition with other schools isn’t the only reason custodial staff may be missing from the building.
“Right now we’re in trouble, because one of the custodians is out because he had surgery, and then we’ve also just had this rash of illnesses,” Mueller said. “The cold’s been kicking everybody’s butts and the stomach flu has been going through, and all things just pile on until there’s just not enough people.”
The understaffing of GHS janitors is a problem for the school and the janitors themselves. The workload increases as the number of custodial staff goes down.
“I only ever really see one janitor, Dustin, in the English hallway,” GHS English teacher Pamela Bihlmaier said. “He comes by every afternoon to pick up trash and clean the halls. I know he works really hard. I just feel like, even though teachers do a little bit to help him out when we put our trash bags outside of our rooms, he still works super hard all the time.”
