Custodians Work Hard, but Students Work Harder to Make Messes

By Anabella V.

A common and recurring issue that is consistently seen at Mountain Range High School is the inconsiderate treatment of our custodial staff. This is assumable because walking around MRHS, there are multiple spots that students have treated carelessly, whether it be the bathrooms, classrooms, or even stairwells. Splatters of mystery liquids, wrappers left scattered across floors, lunch trays shoved in toilets, and what’s really supposed to be in toilets left on the restroom floors. Students are horribly ignorant to those who are already working a difficult job.

The west staircase of Mountain Range is currently seeing the worst of student disrespect. Chocolate milk splatters are thrown on the floor and walls, ripped papers trash the staircase, remains from lunches and breakfasts are crushed, and the foundation of the stairs themselves are being ripped from its place. With this extreme mess it can be assumed that there is some sort of known competition or goal to make this stairwell as dirty as possible.

Pictured here is the west stairwell a week ago. Chocolate milk stains are thrown all over and the stairs are being ripped apart. The question of why students choose to make these messes are still mostly unknown. The custodial staff has to focus on the important work that maintains our school, not the ignorant and childish messes students continue to make. 

January 22, 2026 -

The custodial staff manager, Ricky, who has been working at MRHS for 12 years, provides his insight and opinions surrounding the tasks of janitorial staff. Ricky’s everyday tasks look like maintaining the cafeteria, the most taxing being keeping up with all the events that take place at MRHS, like sports and clubs. Ricky has to keep up with checking on potential gas leaks, broken spots around the school, or to “unclog the toilets, all the fun stuff.”. 

Ricky explains that a minority of students are creating messes around the school, but it’s still difficult to keep up with, especially bathrooms that are regularly being chosen as spots to completely destroy as if it’s their own: “There’s been a ton of times I’ve gone into the bathroom and there’s just a lunch trays or food and literally anything else you could think of that probably shouldn’t be in a bathroom,” an anonymous male MRHS students reveals. “Sometimes there’s food in the toilets or stains all over the walls, it’s really common.” What’s especially common is that most restroom messes are seen in the men’s bathrooms, rather than the women’s restrooms. With food shoved down the toilets and excreted matter (of every kind) in every spot but the toilets, it’s become an issue. This isn’t an act of “not making it in time”, but a “it’s fun to make gross messes and gain attention from doing gross stuff”. 

This is now the west stairwell on Monday, 26th of January. This specific staircase has become significantly worse over just the past week. Who the mess is being created by is unknown, so their anonymous actions to create as big of a mess as possible must be a fun game. What should be regularly cleaned are the important spots; restrooms, classrooms, the cafeteria. Not a random stairwell that shouldn’t need to be focused on by an already busy staff.

January 26, 2026 -

The custodial manager explained that maintaining the school can be a difficult task, especially with a crew of custodians that are experiencing too heavy of a workload, lacking the bigger staff that they need. Ricky has one other custodial staff member working on days, and 6 at night. “I need at least two more people at night.” He said, “When this building opened it had two more people but then because of budget cuts they reduced it over the years.” A large rate of declining job enrollment occurred due to lower income. Because of this, there are night-time workers who are still at MRHS around 11 P.M.

The custodial staff are doing the absolute best they can, which is apparent. However, the custodians need to be treated with utmost respect because most students seem to forget why the school they go to is able to run properly and safely. They don’t come to realize that the cafeteria would not be a clean place to eat, rodents would run around the school, and bathrooms would be disgusting and unusable. Custodians deserve respect and care just as much as the next person.