OTTUMWA —
Your kids may think when school is out, their desk, their classroom, even their school building, sits silently, locked up until they return. The truth is, employees are hurrying to get everything ready for fall, and they don’t have much time.
“There’s a lot of movement in these buildings,” said Danny Renfrew, head of operations for the Ottumwa school district. “A lot of activity.”
He was at Ottumwa High School Friday, but said the elementary buildings are being worked on, as is Evans Middle School. While there weren’t as many people at OHS as there would be on a school day, some areas had just as much noise.
“There are people here all day during the school year,” said Tom Walls, a maintenance employee who normally works until midnight.
Renfrew said teachers, coaches or students are in the schools at some strange hours during the school year. Even during the summer, custodians work around the schedules of teachers and students.
But June, July and August are the months most employees move to day shifts. They’re not emptying waste baskets, sweeping the hall or setting out the lunch tables.
“This is when the heavy work takes place,” said Superintendent Davis Eidahl. “With no kids up and down the hallways, they can block halls, use loud machinery and thoroughly clean classrooms.”
“You have more time to do the things you can’t do [other times]. We do a little bit of everything,” Walls said. “Clean carpets, wax floors, move furniture ...”
In fact, Walls said, they’re usually moving the same furniture twice. They completely clear an office or classroom, do a deep cleaning, then move all the furniture back in. Those are the kinds of tasks being handled by custodians across the Ottumwa school district.
Renfrew said those multi-day projects just don’t work while students and teachers need access to the room.
“This is the time of year they dig deep,” said Eidahl about the maintenance staff in all the buildings.
In the serving kitchen of the high school cafeteria, Dave Riddle was scrubbing the white grout that holds all those tiles together. At least, it’s supposed to be white, Renfrew said. By the end of the school year, the white crisscross pattern starts leaning toward gray or beige.
Riddle’s machine had two brushes scraping through the soap into the cracks to pull out all that grease, Renfrew said.
In a hallway, Walls was running a machine that looked like a cross between a giant version of the sander from a woodshop and a vacuum cleaner. The special buffer is a new machine, designed to strip old, dirty and scratched wax off floors. The old way was to pour a corrosive stripping liquid all over the floor, then scrub.
“I felt this was a safer process than the chemical stripping,” Renfrew said.
There’s been other work done at the schools, including OHS. Returning teachers and students will walk into a freshly painted cafeteria: red and white, of course.
A mixture of outside contractors and school maintenance staff did some of the other projects, such as crushed brick and new landscaping at Schafer Stadium, and the big Ottumwa “O” will get put back now that it’s safe to do so.
And there’s the family and consumer science “foods” classroom, which has new wiring, new drywall and paint.
Again, however, the entire room was empty Friday: no sinks, no stoves, no counters. More importantly: no students or teachers.
Now a crew can get in there.
“These are things that would be impossible during the [school] year,” Renfrew said.
Local News
Related Photos
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Dave Riddle with the custodial staff gets up the grease from an entire school year of lunches at Ottumwa High School. There are workers in the school buildings Monday through Friday; they have about 30 days to be ready to open. Mark Newman/The Courier
School staff hustles during the summer
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