Submitted by Judy Kendrick
Assistant Director for Building Services
Residential Facilities

Spring break for building services is an opportunity staff have to change their routine and provide additional cleaning to enhance the living environment for our students. Spring break is dedicated to cleaning suite bathrooms in the four buildings that make up the Northwest Quad complex.

The buildings include Clark, Gatewood, Harding and Morgan Halls. 

A simple sentence does not do justice to describe the event that takes place. Thirty-four ISA staff clean over 300 toilets, 300 showers, 300 vanities and 600 sinks in approximately 10 hours. Unless you’ve been there and experienced it first hand, you may not understand the conditions they discover in many of the bathrooms.

Over half the bathrooms show strong evidence of cleaning neglect!

Working in some of these conditions would discourage many people, but institutional staff assistants (ISA) find common grounds in making it an enjoyable and pleasant event.

This spring cleaning makes the flip from the academic year to conference services a little easier. Just eight more weeks before they do it again! The change in routine, gives the ISA staff an opportunity to be a little more laid back. A lot of laughter can be heard during the blitz!

Although the spring cleaning is a big job, the ISA staff enjoys the results of their hard work – they walk into the bathrooms with dismay and walk out with great pride in how good they made it look!

In addition to the work at the Quad complex, four staff pull trash from all the other buildings while their fellow team members are blitzing.

Once everyone returns to their assigned building, they focus on cleaning areas they are unable to address daily. When the students return Sunday, all the buildings are clean and healthy.