Summer is no time off for those who maintain Houston schools

As director of maintenance for the Houston County Board of Education, Cecil Parker, along with his staff, keeps busy during the summer while students enjoy their time off.

Residence: Perry

Occupation: Director of maintenance, Houston County Board of Education

Q: What sort of things are custodians and maintenance crews doing in schools over summer break?

A: A lot of things. We do everything from changing the footprint of buildings to cleaning and replacing carpeted floors, stripping and re-waxing tile floors, washing walls, deep cleaning spaces like pressure washing and deep cleaning bathrooms—the work goes on and on.

Q: How many schools, how many buildings, do you take care of?

A: There are 39 schools plus buildings for support that brings the total to 44. We take care of the buildings and landscaping — 1,280 acres. We cut a lot of grass.

Q: How many of you are there in your department?

A: About 150 custodians in the schools and roughly 95 maintenance and grounds guys. And five office people.

Q: What do you think people would find most surprising about what you do?

A: I think the most surprising thing is we take care of 4.6 million square feet of space every day all year long. Each custodian has 27,000 to 28,000 square feet. How many people have a house that’s about 3,000 square feet? Multiply that times nine! That’s what each of our custodians is responsible for daily. I’m constantly amazed at what our in-school custodians do.

Q: What’s your staff breakdown school-wise all year?

A: Typically there are three in elementary schools and eight to 10 in high schools. One will come open up early and be there then another will work into the night. The last guy leaves around 9 p.m. We can clean more efficiently when students aren’t there. We used to do it all in the daytime but it works better this way.

Q: What is the oldest and newest schools?

A: Veterans High is the newest building and as for the oldest, I guess Lindsey or Crossroads, maybe Tucker.

Q: What do you mean by “changing the footprint” of buildings?

A: We remodel and reconstruct to suit (the) principals’ needs. We do it in big ways and smaller ways. Our day-to-day role is to help our principals every way we can so they can concentrate on students’ instruction. We help them squeeze more space out of their facility. It gets tricky but we get creative. We want to take everything off the principals we can so they can concentrate on instruction. We tell our guys all the time.

Q: What’s an example of a changing footprint?

A: We might change a book storage room into a speech lab. Or on a bigger scale, this summer we’re renovating and remodeling half the Houston County Career Academy on Corder Road. Half used to be used by the vocational school but now we have it all. We have to make it suit our needs, like usable for the Warner Robins High School wood shop which is moving over there.

Q: So your department does a lot more than take out trash and sweep floors?

A: We do that and we have people skilled in about every trade so we can do pretty much everything we need too in house. We have HVAC crews, plumbers, electricians, painters — we do about everything except put up chain link fence. Others do that. Everybody stays busy.

Q: You said that includes grounds and landscaping?

A: And stadiums. I tell you, it’s a whole lot easier to keep football fields nice now that there’s more than one. It was tough keeping the grass right when there was just one that got used all the time.

Q: What requires the most overall care?

A: Carpet. The dirt grinds in and wears them out but we’ve found out that if we don’t just have mats outside doorways for people to wipe their feet on but have a run of carpet inside for a little way too, it cleans the bottom of people’s shoes a lot better and, man, it really helps the carpets stay looking good and last longer when you cut down on the dirt and grit tracked in.

Q: What age is rougher on schools: elementary, middle or high school?

A: Middle school. No doubt.

Q: What’s the toughest problem you see regularly?

A: Graffiti. I’d say graffiti and we have a theory about it and how it works. If you leave graffiti they’ll add to it, but if you get it cleaned off right away, at least by the very next day, it discourages them and they don’t keep putting it up. We count graffiti as an emergency and get it gone as soon as we can.

Q: Is there a modern miracle for getting graffiti off?

A: No, just the sooner you get it the better. How you clean depends on the kind of paint and the surface it’s on. Sometimes we have to pressure wash and add a little sand kind of like sandblasting it. But we just use what’s best for that spot. There’s no miracle remover — I wish there was. Off course, you get something indecent off as soon as you can, but really, we get everything off right away.

Q: Back to the summer, you say you strip and wax floors. That’s seems a pretty big job for the space you have to cover.

A: It is. We put together special crews of five or six people in the summer to hit a school and do it. They get it done pretty quick. They do an elementary school in a couple of days and they do it at night because even though you think the schools are empty in the summer, you’d be surprised how much teachers and administrators are there working. And kids are in high school doing all kinds of stuff. But on the floors, the way we take care of them we’re able to do a big strip and wax once a year. We run scrubbers over the floors every night during the year and vacuum the carpets really good.

Q: What are a couple of other things your department does that people might not think of?

A: Oh, I guess maybe that we even do things like pour concrete and make sidewalks when we need to. We work on electrical circuits and as we create more and more computer labs it takes more work to make sure they get good power, clean power. We do whatever needs doing.

Q: How long is summer break? How long do you have to get everything done?

A. We have 41 working days then there coming in no matter what. We take a lot of pride in our facilities and I’m proud of our staff. We get top marks when we get evaluate on what shape our schools are in.

This story was originally published June 10, 2017 at 9:47 AM with the headline "Summer is no time off for those who maintain Houston schools."