Custodians at work: cleaning up the gum

Mia Lopez-ZubiriStaff WriterStudents chew gum all the time, often dropping it on the floor or sticking it under a desk once they are done with it. Sometimes they even stick it in keyholes of classroom doors. Most students never think about who has to clean the gum up.School custodian Felipe Cueva, who works on the second floor of the science and technology buildings, says that he spends time every day scraping gum off the floor, which interrupts his cleaning routine.“I can’t say an exact time but I do it daily. I don’t want to see my building filling up with gum,” Cueva said. “When you go in a classroom and are sweeping, you have to stop and clean the gum as soon as you see it so it doesn’t build up.”Luckily for some custodians, it doesn’t always take a long time to pick up the gum. Custodian Debrah McNeely says that although she doesn’t spend a lot of time cleaning gum, she can see how it could take hours.“It could be an all day job because there’s a lot of gum on the floor and the walls,” McNeely said. “I try to do a little each day.”Each custodian is responsible for cleaning a different part of campus and find different locations where there is a lot of gum. Custodian Candice Taylor says that she spends the most time in classrooms, while McNeely finds the kitchen to be most gum-heavy.“It all depends where the gum is, because it’s everywhere,” McNeely said. “When I do the kitchen floor and there’s gum it will take an extra 20 minutes of my time."Fortunately for the custodians, according to Cueva, many teachers try to help by keeping students from dropping gum, but there are a few who appear to rarely clean their classrooms.“Most teachers help me keep the classrooms clean but a couple don’t care,” Cueva said. “I get gum from the technology building every single day. Some classrooms look like they haven’t been cleaned in weeks.”The custodians clean the gum using a putty knife, which they slide underneath the gum and then scrape up. The time it takes to unstick the gum depends on how long it has been on the floor and how hard it has become.“When you sweep you stop, scrape up gum and then keep sweeping,” Cueva said. “You are wasting time. You have to stop what you are doing. Why don’t kids just put it in the trash can?”In an anonymous poll conducted by The Samohi, students commented on how outlawing gum makes proper disposal difficult.“If you aren’t supposed to be chewing gum in the first place, you can’t get up to throw it away,” a Samo student said.Cueva says that even if students don’t throw out their gum, they can wrap it in paper when they are finished so that if it falls on the floor, it doesn’t stick and is easier to sweep up.In past years the custodians also cleaned the gum off the underside of desks until it began to take too much time. According to McNeely, they now only clean the desks during the summer.“In the summer we try and get the gum off the sidewalk,” Cueva said. “And it’s so impossible, even with a steamer.”Cueva also says that cleaning gum all the time has left him without appetite for it.“I chew gum once in a while if someone offers me some, but I will never buy gum,” Cueva said.According to McNeely, there isn’t a true solution to avoiding the gum droppings, which create more work for the custodians.“Unless you watch people 24/7, there’s nothing you can do,” McNeely said. “People chew gum and they’re going to do things with it.”However, if students are more conscious about where they throw away their gum, they can both save the custodian’s time and beautify the Samo campus.“It stops us custodians from doing our normal work—work for administrators, picking up and delivering,” custodian Jeff Peoples said. “There’s more important stuff that we should be doing. If the kids would work with us the school would be a more beautiful place for all of us.”