A Grade-F Nightmare: After-School Cleanup

After the clamor had died away and thousands of students had raced off to start the summer vacations they had dreamed about, one big detail remained before the school year ended in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Call it a custodian’s nightmare: the cleanup that started just after the schools closed at 12:20 p.m. Friday.

“There is trash everywhere!” said Gloria Teavey, a Palisades High School custodian. “We are talking all over the (school grounds), in the plant boxes, on the sidewalks. There’s old homework, notebooks . . . anything in (students’) lockers that they don’t want, they feel free to throw out--all over.”

Van Frazer, Bancroft Junior High plant manager, said: “You can find anything from shoes to T-shirts to 2-liter Coke bottles. But if they leave it in their lockers, it’s history. It’s getting thrown out.”

The refuse, Teavey said with a laugh, included items that “you might like to take home--maybe a good notebook, a nice pair of shoes, a good jacket. Sometimes I wonder why they leave so much behind.”

Stephanie Vernon, a Bancroft eighth-grader, had one explanation, saying students don’t care about their possessions because they’re “just too lazy!”

Rasool Raheem, a Bancroft seventh-grader, agreed, adding: “Some kids say, ‘We’re going to come back and clean up the mess.’ I guess they never do.”

Bancroft principal Peggy Selma observed that when the school year ends, “the children go to their lockers and the things that at the beginning of the year were once so priceless” just don’t seem to have the same value. And where the items end up at year’s end reflects just that.

At Palisades High alone, the once priceless booty by midday had filled seven large trash bins--three or four more containers than usual--and custodians said they still had lots more garbage to collect, Teavey said. At Marshall High, students--working in a brigade known as the “Minute Men and Minute Maids”--lent a helping hand to the custodial staff as part of an 8-year-old program.

“They make a great contribution,” said Perry Spencer, Marshall’s plant manager. “They sure make our job a lot easier.”

Although most public schools try to make lives easier by conducting a locker clean-out and inspection in which administrators try to round up lost textbooks and other materials lent to students for the year, “the kind of books that were found” Friday at Bancroft didn’t exactly match the middle school curriculum, Selma said.

The captured collections “had some very risque material in them,” she said, adding, “I mean, Playboy had nothing on what these magazines had to offer.”

This year’s end-of-year “rubbage dump” did offer one positive attribute, school janitors said.

“The mess was lighter this year than any other,” said Teavey who has raked up after Palisades students for five years. “Maybe (students) are beginning to realize what slobs they are” and are trying a little harder, he said. “Most are well-mannered enough so that if they happen to drop something while I’m around, they will pick it up.”