Fresno City College is an active campus with many events on it at once. The buildings are constantly being used and need to be cleaned. Is the campus dirtier than it should be?
When the college custodial staff cleans they focus on certain areas depending on the building size and foot traffic. Certain areas need more cleaning than others, according to Jerry Hernandez, the buildings and grounds custodial manager.
“They’ll start with the bathrooms, eating areas. Make sure that all the sanitation side of the responsibilities is done, as well as the garbage, throwing out the garbage, cleaning the classrooms,” Hernandez said. “Custodians have assignments. Either the floor or an entire building.”
Most of the staff works on a night shift to clean the buildings. The custodial staff seen throughout the day focuses on “bathroom refreshers,” or general eating areas, according to Hernandez.
Giovanny Alvarez, a criminology major at FCC, said that the campus is overall well maintained, and doesn’t have a lot of complaints.
“The bathrooms? Honestly, there’s some bathrooms where people try to avoid, I don’t know if it’s how old they are or if it’s just they’re not maintained,” Alvarez said. “But for the most part, the campus itself is maintained, the bathrooms could use a little work.”
According to the 2020/2021 Human Resource Priorities Report, it was recommended that there should be an additional four custodial staff members on the team. Since then the school received approval for two additional custodial staff members according to Daniel Moore, the vice president of Administrative Services.
“And in addition, we’ve increased student workers that assist with some of the custodial refreshers and things of that nature as well,” Hernandez said.
FCC campus is constantly evolving. Over the past few years new additions have been added, such as the West Fresno Center and the New Science Building. These additions also have to be accommodated.
The campus has developed and changed since 2020. The schedules that worked then, no longer work now. So while they have added two additional staff members which will help, they still have to actively search for new ways to optimize the work on campus.
“We do our best to recalibrate, and it’s still a work in progress,” Moore said.
Isaac McCombs, an English major at FCC, said that one area on campus that isn’t clean are the lockers.
“There’s just a lot of dirt and sometimes trash in there, even though there’s like nothing in there,” McCombs said.
FCC is a campus that constantly hosts different events. The staff does their best to compensate for this, but it may cause people to be moved around to accommodate for events.
“So, there’s some days we might have one event. There’s some we might have 17,” Moore said. “We kind of take a flex approach, where, for instance, if we know on a given Wednesday there’s going to be 17 things going on, we do our best to maybe flex resources temporarily.
People complain about campus, but when asked overall, students don’t seem to have much of an issue other than the bathroom.
Elisa Tapia, an English major at FCC, has concerns over the bathroom being dirty.
“I feel like the campus is pretty clean. The restrooms can kind of get dirty, but that’s just restrooms,” Tapia said. “No, that restroom up there [second story Art/Home Economics building restrooms] that’s always dirty, they should really fix that.”
Recently, a new program, Respect the Ram, started to bring awareness to the cleanliness on campus. According to Moore, keeping the campus clean should not be only a responsibility delegated to building services.
“We’re not asking people to put on gloves and to get a scrubbing machine, but if you’re in a classroom or a conference room when you get up, if you can push your chair back in, if you eat food, if you can make sure you put your trash into, you know, receptacle. If you’re walking on campus and you see a Pepsi can on the ground, please pick it up, put it in the trash,” Moore said. “Little things like that add up so that the limited building services, staffing resources we have, we can focus on other things.”
There are QR codes around campus on the Respect the Ram flyers, which will lead students to be able to submit requests or concerns about areas or issues arising on campus. Hernandez encourages students to utilize this feature.
Despite the criticism from some students on campus, FCC campus has been complimented on the cleanliness and was “hitting the mark” on the standard of cleanliness, according to Moore.
“I think it’s every five to seven years we get accredited, we got a lot of compliments on the cleanliness level of our campus grounds and bathrooms and classrooms, in comparison to other districts in college, the accreditation team has, in fact, visited,” Moore said. “So regardless of what Jerry or Daniel says, that really speaks volumes in the context of the education, public sector community that we’re in.”
