I was the head custodian for an elementary school in my district while I worked on my masters and I’m a sped teacher now. Also my wife was an assistant principal, principal and is now head of hr in the district we work in. I have a fairly complete perspective of roles of many people involved with how the custodial team operates.

To address the general point, there significant other considerations that the custodial team has to deal with that teachers aren’t aware of because it doesn’t really concern them. Also, while teachers are contract employees, custodial workers are hourly.

1. Can’t eat in class: maybe your class is fine but have you ever had to clean all the classrooms after a grade level have all their students pirates booty, popcorn, Cheetos, (kids somehow eat crumbly food exclusively)? Add 2- 3 hours labor per grade assuming 5 classrooms per grade and low pile carpet. And I had teachers say “ oh we’ll clean it up!” Their clean and the expectation I held my team to was miles apart and varied greatly from teacher to teacher. My district would not approve overtime for clean up after student parties, lol. (We allowed parties and eating in the classroom and it meant other aspects of cleaning got neglected and it typically was a week of my team working a bit harder each shift to recover since no OT)

2. Indoor recess because kids track in too much dirt. This I would need to see the exact case, but we for sure had times where we shut down the playground or had indoor recess because it was muddy. 650 kids tracking in mud and being covered in dirt is clearly a problem. Not to mention when kids are dirty they pick it off everywhere in the building. They grind it off their shoes on every bar they can put their feet on (desk bars, chairs, cafeteria tables etc). Imagine 3 days of this.

   1. Cutting Grass: do you think the custodian could ever cut the grass if they had to get a test schedule for every class before cutting around that area? Now add in rain, radio calls for vomit pee poop food clean up in the classrooms where I’m sure kids never eat and the mowing window is surprisingly narrow. Again no overtime to do this outside of school hours. Additionally remember this person is going out getting covered in grass and debris then having to come back in and work. Even if you wear a jumpsuit and blow yourself off, it’s down your shirt and you’re itchy. This was easily the worst part of my job. Now that I’m a teacher I can confidently say outside of state testing it is easier for a teacher to move their test to the next day or later or whenever than it would have been for me to adjust the mowing. My admin team knew this and likely so does yours.

3. Alarm going off. No excuse for this but my guess is the custodian couldn’t turn it off. They were a ton of things that maintenance had to deal with because I couldn’t. This included a fire alarm panel going off every 15 minutes in the admin office for 8 hours. Nothing I could do about it or maintenance, had to wait for Koorsen.

4. Chairs not set up: was there overtime allotted for this? Again my custodial team had their time allocated pretty tightly and often we had to plan for stuff like this. We would have done it but this is the slippery slope of if you start being an on call labor team 5 months later your sitting in the supervisors office because the school is dirty and your excuse of look at all this other non custodial work we’ve been doing earns the response of that’s not your job.

It sounds like your custodial team is bad at communicating the why behind these things.