Every school day just after 2 p.m., Sandra pushes her cart into my classroom to clean the bathroom and empty the trash cans.
She is the school custodian and my students love her.
I love her, too.
When we hear her squeaky wheels in the hallway outside our door, we listen for her kind voice and contagious giggle.
"Ms. Sandra! Ms. Sandra! Can I help you empty the trash? Can I help you?" they yell out with their hands waving in the air.
"Jennifer,” she says, “You look so cute today! How you doin' VicTOR? Francisco, baby, you look like you're doing a good job for Mr. Barton. You come on over and help me today. Anna, honey, that's okay, you can help me tomorrow."
She knows all of my students by name.
One day, I asked Sandra something I’d been wondering for a while.
“What do you like best about working at our school?"
She put her hands on her hips.
"It's the kids! Hmph. I don’t take home much money. I barely make enough to cover food, clothes and rent, so it's not the money. (Note to self: someone who works so hard for 8 hours a day shouldn’t struggle to make ends meet. What can you do, TSB, to help fix that?) I work second shift, so it’s not the hours. And people look at me and see a janitor, so it’s not the way I'm treated. But I love the kids. It’s the kids.”
She does love the kids.
Last Friday, one of our second-graders was having a tough day.
I asked him to pick up trash he’d left at the table during lunch.
“I hate teachers!” he screamed.
He threw his tray onto the floor, stomped over to the corner of the cafeteria and refused to budge.
He fell apart.
Sandra helped put him back together again.
"Now, you know you can't act that way,” she said in her precise, slow, southern drawl. “I know your momma. I'm gonna get out my cell phone and call her and tell her you're not actin' right."
Soon, she had him cleaning up his tray and washing the table where his class had been sitting.
On another day, I saw her give an extra milk to a student.
"Sometimes, I buy my lunch and sit beside a child I know is hungry," she told me. "Then I can say, 'You can have some of this if you want it, or, ‘You can have some of that.' Children can't learn if they're hungry."
When she leaves my classroom, she walks across the hall.
"Hello A," I hear her say. "Look at those new glasses on you. They make you look so handsome."
She knows all of the names and stories of the students in that class, too.
"Mr. Barton," she said to me during a quiet moment after school, "I know 'bout these children because I come from where they come. Are you feelin' me? Sometimes, they need somebody to talk to them who understands them."
I see the way Sandra loves our students, the way she knows their names. How she talks to them and helps them.
When I look at her, I don’t see a janitor.
I see her.
“I'm glad you're in the world,” I told her. “What would we do without you?"
Here’s to all the Sandras in our schools and in our world!
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