The Unsung Heroes of Cal Young and the Waste we Ignore

    The Unsung Heroes of Cal Young and the Waste We Ignore

By: Olivia Wright

Date: January 2025

It's lunchtime, and kids are talking with friends noisily, and eating food to fill up their stomachs before next period. Some people leave to go play outside with their friends, while others go get lunch from the lunch line, but almost everyone leaves trash on the table for Christina and Steve to clean up. 

At Cal Young Middle School, we have a problem. We leave half of our trash and food on the table without cleaning it up. And guess who does the work to clean up the trash that we leave? Christina Snyder, Steve Cooper, and Robert Chaffee, our custodians in shining armor! They work constantly to help make our school a better and cleaner place to be. If they didn’t help out and clean our school, then we would be in one nasty place.

To gain a clear understanding about how this process really works, I interviewed Christina, the head custodian for our school. She said that the amount of trash she cleans up fills up around 5 trash bins each lunch! That's 10 bins per day and a lot more than she should be cleaning! 

Every day she picks up the trash we leave on our tables, mops and sweeps the floor, and at the end of the day rides a machine that cleans our floors and gets them ready for the next day. After that, she restocks paper towels and soap dispensers, fixes things that need to be fixed, does laundry, and overall helps make our school a better place.

When Christina and I were talking about how we waste a lot of food, she said that we waste about “15lb of food waste and 20lb of compost”. Think about it. We waste 15lb of food and 20lb of compost. That is a lot of food and trash that we mostly don’t even use. We dump so much food into the food bin that it fills up 1 bin each lunch! We need to start eating our food and not wasting it.

One thing that we need to consider is how much we are showing our gratitude to our custodians. If you see Christina or Steve in the halls or in the lunchroom, say, for example, “Hey, Christina! Thank you for cleaning our school!” Our custodians do so much work that goes unappreciated. The least we can do is say thank you and show appreciation for what they are doing.

In order to start helping out, we need to focus more on keeping Cal Young clean. Most of us don’t care about the food we waste and leave behind, but we need to start paying attention. It can go from a cleaning club to just remembering not to waste food, and throwing away all your trash, but let’s take responsibility, and help make Cal Young a cleaner place for everyone.