Mountain Ridge High School custodian staff tidies up for new school year
Aug 20, 2024, 12:08 PM | Updated: 1:53 pm
HERRIMAN — Before a school opens, there is a lot that needs to get done to tidy up from the past year and make it sparkling for the next.
For Mountain Ridge High School, which is home to 2,600 plus students, getting ready means using the summer to do some major cleaning.
While school is out for the summer, cleaning does not stop. In fact, the head custodian tells us they are busiest in the summer.
“If you’ve done it enough, you can get going pretty quick,” said Kevan Sprague, head custodian of Mountain Ridge High School.
Sprague and his team have covered every inch of Mountain Ridge High School inside and out. This does not happen overnight; rather, it takes hours of hard work and upkeep throughout the year.
“Clean walls, windows, get gum off the carpets, camps, clinics; working around those too,” Sprague said.
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When asked if he gets tired, the answer is sometimes yes!
“Sometimes my body feels it when you’ve walked around enough and do your different things,” he said.
With 400,000 square feet inside and out to tend to, from grooming the football field to shoveling snow and making sure concessions are good to go. Thankfully, this year, they have some extra help.
“It’s an automatic scrubber. It’s a robot. It says, ‘Will you please move out of the way? I’m trying to clean here.’ So it will actually talk,” Sprague said. “It’ll scrub. It’ll go around things. Move around. It’ll go back to a docking station when it’s done.”
It is a time saver for Sprague’s team. A job that might take two hours for a human, but for the new machine, it will cut that time in half.
“It takes about two and a half to three hours just to sweep and scrub the halls manually upstairs. With this, it takes about an hour and a half to do the halls,” Sprague said.
He said that custodian can focus on another job while the machine cleans the hall.
“Like downstairs deep clean while this is scrubbing upstairs. So, this saves a couple of hours every night on the route,” Sprague said.
This robot frees up time to work in other high-traffic areas, such as the commons, gym, and fitness rooms.
“This is the little camera that’s here, so it focuses around. It’ll go fast and slow down,” Sprague said.
Some things have to be done the long way.
“We have to go around physically. There’s seven combos built into each combo. We have to physically rotate that to the next year. We rotate those six times to make sure, and that’s with 2,600 lockers,” Sprague said.
Sprague cleaning one of thousands of lockers that need cleaning before the school year starts. (KSL TV)
Sprague said the time and hard work are totally worth it the second students walk through the door.
“I love the students. I love my job. I love who I work with, and it’s fun, and even now when the sports teams are coming back you get to see some. I love working here, and the students make it awesome,” he said.
