“Clean up. Clean up. Everybody do your share.”
These words once sung by our favorite purple dinosaur seem to have faded from our minds. As we’ve traded our Play-Doh for calculus textbooks, we’ve failed to uphold the most basic maturity and respect as students in such a prestigious school with a beautiful campus should. We are carelessly littering in a building we are fortunate to utilize.
The bottom line is that we need to stop treating our school like a pigsty and clean up after ourselves.
In Bellaire’s old building, we had 15 custodians. Despite the size of our new building, that number dwindled down to a mere 11 due to custodians being transferred to other schools. Now, with just eight, it’s virtually impossible for them to keep up with the amount of garbage us students leave in our halls. Eight custodians versus a behemoth of a building spanning three stories and 396,378 square feet is not a fair fight when we treat it the way we do.
For custodian Jackeline Santos, the cafeteria is the hardest part of the school to clean. She and her coworkers start cleaning right after the lunch bell rings around 1:15 p.m. and don’t finish until 2:35 p.m. That’s more than an hour of sweeping floors, wiping tables and picking up wrappers that could’ve just been tossed in a trash can. On top of that, custodians don’t receive most of the supplies that they need to do their job — with brooms, dustpans and mop handles being donated by the National Honor Society.
It’s not just gross but plain disrespectful. These custodians work early mornings and late afternoons to maintain a campus that we enjoy. The least we can do is meet them halfway — or at least to the nearest trash can.
But our littering all stems from one common cause — a general lack of empathy and respect for other human beings. This notion of disrespect has seeped into other aspects of Bellaire, whether it be talking back to teachers, ignoring administrators or outright mocking faculty and staff. It just so happens that the most obvious physical manifestation of this flippancy is the trash lining the hallways.
We are too old to be acting the way that we have when it comes to trash and picking up after ourselves. Not only does it make the custodians’ jobs harder, but it’s also embarrassing and gross. No one wants to see entire cartons of chocolate milk spilled in the bathrooms, and the custodians surely don’t enjoy cleaning it either.
With a building like Bellaire, it’s imperative that we consider the effects of our actions. What may seem insignificant, like leaving a wrapper on the floor, can become a serious issue when it’s over 3000 students having the exact same behavior.
So don’t let the small things pile up. Pick up after yourself. Don’t leave trash everywhere. Have some basic human empathy for our custodians.
Yes, it’s easier for you to leave your trash on the table. Yes, you don’t care if you just dropped that chocolate pudding, as long as you don’t have to clean it up.
But someone else does.
And if you have somehow made it all the way to high school without realizing that your actions can have negative impacts, then there are bigger issues at hand.
Everybody everywhere in Bellaire needs to do their share.
