Sunday, June 30, 2024
During the summer months, work may cease for students, teachers, and staff, but that is not the case for the maintenance and custodial crews at the five campuses of Gatesville Independent School District. Maintenance crews are busy year-round keeping campuses in tip-top shape.
GISD Superintendent Dr. Barrett Pollard said, “The maintenance department works extremely hard during the summer. Not only do they have to keep up with general maintenance, but also the mowing and weed-eating responsibilities are huge. Plus, keeping all the HVAC units working in this heat is very time consuming. In addition, they complete special projects during the summer that they could not otherwise complete when students are in session.”
GISD Maintenance Director Toby Williams said, “The only three windows we have to do our work is during spring break, the Christmas break, and the summer break. However, these windows of opportunity are getting smaller every year because of camps and summer school. Basically, its just July that you have a window to do a lot of work, because there’s still a lot going on in June.”
During the summer months, Williams said, “There’s a lot more to do, and it works out where we can get the most work done, because we don’t have the teachers and students, and you can get into the classrooms and do what needs to be done. Summer months give you more time.”
In addition to the maintenance crew, the custodial workers stay busy during the summer, which affords them the opportunity to deep clean the classrooms, offices, open areas, cafeterias, and gymnasiums.
Custodial workers are often responsible for moving classrooms when a teacher is reassigned to a different grade or room. The custodians must move classroom furniture, school supplies, books, and other objects.
In addition to sanitizing each campus, they must address cleaning desks and chairs, walls, and any other surface a child or adult may have touched that could potentially contain germs. These dedicated crews often have a very short time during the summer to perform this major task.
The maintenance crew has been staying busy the last few weeks on remodeling the bathrooms at the GHS baseball field, along with changing all the AC filters and adding a few offices on various campuses where they are needed. “We’re building a few walls and knocking down a few and installing a few doors,” Williams said.
As far as grounds maintenance, Williams said, “Mowing is non-stop, especially with all the rain we’ve had – it’s kind of hard to stay ahead of it. We’ve got a crew that works on it every day. You could have a ten-guy crew working on the grounds most of the time, but it has been hard to maintain with the way the rain has been lately.
The maintenance workers are currently preparing for a project to change out a few air conditioning units on the roofs of the junior high and high school. “We’ll have to use a crane for that, and that will happen in the next couple of months,” Williams said.
During the summer months, the GISD maintenance crew works from 6 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday. “We beat the heat a little bit, and everyone likes a three-day weekend,” Williams said.
