Quinten Bright ’19

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Lunchtime, for many students, is the one point in the school day where they get a taste of freedom. It’s not just a free period for you and a couple of friends; it’s a free period for everyone in the school, and most of them are all concentrated in one spot. But soon the cafeteria quiets down and the students shuffle out and into their next class, thinking only of getting through the day and forgetting completely about the spilled beverages and scraps of sandwiches and brown paper bags that they left all over their tables.

Many students I’m sure haven’t even caught a glimpse of the staff whose job it is to deal with the aftermath of a bunch of teenagers that have been let loose in one spot for almost an hour, but that 45-minute period for students is multiple hours of work everyday for the cleaning staff.

It’s easy to look at the big picture of Strake Jesuit and forget the meticulous details that go into making our school look and feel this clean, presentable, and inviting on any given day. For everything on campus, from cleaning the lunch tables to mowing the grass on the quad to actually making the daily lunch, there is a staff member contributing to it. These are the most underappreciated members of Strake Jesuit.

It’s easy to forget just how many people are needed to maintain the top-tier shape that Strake Jesuit is in, and how much hard work each one of them needs to put in. Most probably will still rarely see the staff, but next time you’re using the restroom, or playing on any of Strake’s fields, or eating lunch in the library or the Clay building, let the staff know you appreciate them by cleaning up after yourself and giving them a break from their hard work.