Building services has a harder job, more hours and later nights than most students think. Not only do they work overtime hours on the weekend for football games or school plays but they clean up the school in the dead of the morning preparing the bathrooms and Commons for the swarm of students every day.
Each building service member is assigned a certain time slot that they can work. First, there is the school day shift, working through all the students to pick up trash, clean the bathrooms and fold up the school cafeteria after the large crowd. While these service workers have to show up at 6 A.M and stay until after school ends around 3, they don’t get paid nearly as much as the workers who have evening or night shifts. “I love working during the school day because I can talk to all of the students while also doing my job,” building service worker Maria Carrasco said.
After school, the second wave of building service is the evening shift working well into the night, getting paid a higher rate than the school day shift. Having most of the same jobs as the day staff, they must ensure that the school stays clean while students, teachers and guests enter and exit the school during extracurricular activities, sports and meetings held in various rooms in the building. “Payment revolves entirely around the hours of the day that the are assigned to work. The later the hours, the higher the rate,” School Business Administrator Philip Hill said.
Finally there is an overnight work shift consisting of another round of clean-up, air-conditioning and heating maintenance and electrical work that goes on in the late hours of the night getting paid the highest rate out of all the shifts. These spots are usually filled the quickest and have to be rotated based on worker availability and scheduled weekly.
Anytime that these service members have to work over the eight hours that they are assigned, they can get paid overtime, which is double their hourly rate. Overtime doesn’t normally occur during the week due to the tight scheduling but on the weekends when there are games and other events overtime is something to be won. Most of the building service have to request the overtime due to the limited hours and multitude of members eligible for the position.

Kelly Schuler

Commons Editor