The Parkway School District is experiencing a custodian shortage. Here is a closer look at how South High is dealing with the problem.
From dusty floors to bathroom shutdowns, it is no secret that South High is experiencing a shortage within the custodial staff. Assistant Principal Eric Wilhelm said the entire school is supposed to have 13 custodians, but is currently making do with 8.
Brian Medlock has been working for Parkway for 27 years. He used to work at the Parkway administrative level, and now works as a custodian at South High. He said that after the Pandemic, there was a paradigm shift in the way that labor thinks.
“People worked from home and became used to a different lifestyle for a year, and their expectations changed of what they wanted in a job,” Medlock said. “And then you had inflation, there was higher inflation during the COVID time period. The prices of buying gas, groceries, and the prices of cars have skyrocketed.”
Medlock said he believes the custodial shortage is mostly a wage issue, and that there have been increases in custodial wages happening at the district level.
“We started off with $11 an hour starting wage, and we’re bumping that up to $14, $15, $16 an hour, but that still has not been meeting the expectations of the labor market,” Medlock said.
The shortage at Parkway is not just custodial, there has also been a shortage in facility workers, roofers, electricians, and warehouse workers. Medlock thinks that more collaboration between Parkway on the district level would bring us closer to a solution.
“We have school board meetings every couple of months, where the facility workers show up, and a secretary who has been working here for 45 years said ‘this used to feel like a family, and it doesn’t anymore.’ That is definitely true. When I first came here, Parkway felt like a family, not just within the school, but the district as a whole. Parkway South itself feels like a family, but the district as a whole feels like a tug of war between our needs and desires, versus the district trying to meet those needs and desires,” Medlock said.
Medlock said he has had to work overtime in order to compensate for the lack of custodial staff.
“I’m here at 5:30 in the morning, and I am supposed to get off at 2 o’clock, but I find myself staying until 4-5 o’clock in the evening,” Medlock said. “It’s necessary in order to get the work done.”
The staffing shortage has also affected the custodians physically, according to Medlock.
“Our work is double, sometimes triple in some places,” Medlock says, “and it’s been very stressful, especially on the older custodians.”
The impact of the shortage has spread to teachers as well. Stacey Larson is the ceramics teacher at South High. She has expressed safety concerns with the absence of a custodian to mop her room every day.
”Because our material is clay and ground clay when in a powder when inhaled can cause silicosis over time, which is a lung disease. So I just need the floors cleaned daily,” Larson explains.
So far, Larson and her students have been able to make do with their situation for the time being.
“I get on the students about sweeping and using the wet mops, and alloting extra time in each class period to clean in order to keep it safe in here. It’s an adjustment that we’ve made. It’s not the worst, I kind of enjoy that my students are taking on a little bit more responsibility and ownership. It would be nice to have that final check at the end of the night just to make sure that we did get everything done,” Larson said.
The students have also taken notice of the lack of cleanliness throughout South High. Senior Sophie Little has been taking FACS classes throughout her high school career and is currently taking Housing and Interior Design with Evalyn Petty, and she is cadet teaching education and training with Monica Dickens.
“The classrooms are worse than the kitchen. The floors are very dirty, and nothing is picked up; the teachers have to pick things up,” Little said.
The kitchen has been prioritized as a space the custodians clean every day, but the classrooms are not swept nearly as often. Typically, custodians only have enough time to take out the trash of each classroom most days. The students have been helping out to solve this issue, by doing little tasks like sweeping, cleaning sinks, wiping down desks, and putting up their chairs at the end of the day. But Little wonders if there is more that the teachers and administrators could be doing to motivate students to help out.
“For the kitchen, we have quarterly cleaning where we sweep, so maybe doing that more often. I don’t feel like there is a lot that we can do unless the teachers implement it, for extra credit or volunteer hours,” Little says.
Wilhelm is involved with custodial staffing at South High. He says that students used to have more opportunities to help clean the school.
“Key Club used to help clean the lunchrooms for volunteer hours, and we used to have students in detention take out the trash as a punishment, but we obviously can’t do that anymore,” he said.
Wilhelm said he has been trying to do little things every day to encourage students to clean up after themselves.
“I am the lunch monitor for first lunch, and every day at the end of the lunch, I try to remind students to throw away their trash,” he said.
