It’s 5am, where are you? Asleep or at home?  

   Joseph Stewart, The head custodian here at East, is already at school getting the campus ready for students to storm the halls. Everyday at school, Mr. Stewart is the only member of custodial staff on campus until noon. One custodian vs. the mess of over 2,000 students-how would you feel? 

   2,141 students, six administrators and a whopping seven full time janitors.  At East, there is trash littering the ground around every corner. There are stall doors ripped off of walls, no locks and broken sinks. Students are getting escorted to the bathrooms like children.

     The reality is that East looks and feels gloomy. The environment that students and staff spend the majority of their time in is negatively impacting everyone’s mood “It makes me sad to see our campus this way,” junior Lyla Zimmerman said. “I don’t understand why people don’t care about the school that we go to.”

   It’s not just the trash and decaying bathrooms that is contributing to this gloom over East. Students walking during transitions have started dreading their trek to class. The trip between classes is supposed to give students a minor brain break and refresh their minds for their next lesson; but with East’s campus, students don’t get that luxury.

    “I feel stressed as I walk around school,” senior Brooke Romig said. “It would be nice to see more plants, flowers and life on our campus.”

   Students are supposed to have unwavering school spirit, and this campus is diminishing that. “As I walk around school I don’t feel proud to call this my school,” Zimmerman said. “It looks broken, and I can’t stand it.”  

   As members of East its staff and students’ responsibility is to have pride in their school and take care of the buildings and grounds that they spend so much time in. East Meck has a total of 9 janitors employed, two of which being part time. This is nowhere near the number needed to deal with the growing numbers of students.

   Because of how the students treat the campus and the amount of disrespect towards the custodial workers, East is struggling to keep janitors on staff. Many believe that as highschool students, they should be able to throw away their own trash and not break the bathrooms. Custodians don’t want to have to deal with the messes as much as the students who created them do.

   Continuing to just ignore the issues on East’s campus will only make them worse. With each piece of trash thrown on the ground and with each person walking past it the campus atmosphere gets worse and worse. It becomes acceptable to litter and not care about how that might affect your peers and their emotions. 

   “There are dead plants covered in trash and gum” said senior Woodrow Gray, “I don’t see any grass or living plants, and that makes walking around campus depressing”.

   With the sheer amount of students and waste produced, its nearly impossible for the campus to be clean with the number of custodians on staff; accountability needs to be taken and students need to create more campus clean up opportunities  

   “We need more campus clean ups,” said Romig. “The few that we do a year isn’t enough to keep our school clean.”  With more campus clean ups comes more students who feel passionate about how their campus looks, creating a positive stigma around caring for the environment. Adding new plant life and maybe even art to the campus such as sculptures made by students would drastically increase the positive emotions around campus and help students feel less anxious and stressed. 

   With all the negative emotions lowered, students will have an easier time focusing and being productive in their next class. This is more than just a physical issue for East, the severity of this situation grows with the population, as East grows a change in behavior must happen before the mess becomes completely unmanageable. 

   Amidst the mounding trash and crumbling atmosphere East’s campus will not survive much longer if the members of this school don’t take action.