Classrooms in the Teaching and Learning Center may need more TLC — tender love and care — said Dinah Zeiger, UI Journalism and Mass Media professor.
Zeiger said the room she teaches in at the TLC became increasingly dirty over time and filled with the pronounced smell of rotting food.
She said students and teachers should not have to sit in a dirty classroom.
“It’s demoralizing to students and teachers to be in a dirty space,” Zeiger said. “… Especially for students who are paying an increasingly large amount in tuition to come to school here, at the very least (students) should be able to expect is that your classrooms are clean.”
Zeiger said this does not mean somebody should sweep between classes, or that students and teachers are exempt from picking up after themselves, but that classrooms should be cleaned at least once a day.
The fact that the classrooms aren’t being cleaned properly is not a result of the janitorial staff doing a poor job, but instead a result of the lack of janitorial staff due to “enormous” budget cuts, Zeiger said.
“They’ve cut some jobs that I think are essential jobs that matter deeply to the fabric of our university, who are people that we often never see,” she said. “And that’s the people who do empty our trash and vacuum our carpets … They are not a huge amount of money and they make an enormous impact on the day-to-day sense of pride in this place where we go to school, and in the long term viability of the physical fabric of the university.”
If buildings aren’t kept clean, they break down and deteriorate more quickly, Zeiger said.
“We have a lot of old buildings and they’re precious artifacts,” she said. “I don’t complain about them because they’re old buildings, my complaint would be that they’ve not been taken care of and that just in this basic cleanliness issue — aside from replacing the flooring and heating systems — just the basic cleaning of them, that is a part that’s due to us.”
Zeiger said she left a complaint with Mark Miller, UI associate director of Operations for the Idaho Commons and Student Union.
“He very kindly responded in an email to say ‘Look, we know this is happening and we are trying very hard not to let this happen,'” she said.
Miller said the biggest problem is the lack of staff to clean the TLC.
The TLC is about 65,000 square feet, and houses more than 30 administrative offices, including ITS Help Desk, ITS classroom support, the Dean of Students Office, Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Diversity Center, Miller said.
He said when the TLC was renovated a few years ago, three full-time custodians maintained the building, plus a few temporary and student employees. Due to personnel cuts and holdbacks that all departments have had to face, they lost one full-time employee, Miller said.
“Essentially we lost a third of our staff,” Miller said. “The two other permanent people that are there had to pick up those duties.”
Other problems in the TLC include design issues and food and drink brought by students into classrooms, Miller said.
Four thousand students a day are catered to in the TLC, in classrooms that have 10 minutes in between each class, Miller said.
“We literally have no chance to get in and even empty garbage between classes, and there’s no policy on campus that keeps students from bringing food and beverage into classrooms,” he said. “Very seldom is there a day that any given classroom in the TLC doesn’t have two or three cups of coffee or sodas spilled in it, and leftover food that doesn’t even make its way to the garbage can. When it does make its way to the garbage can, it sits in the garbage can all day.”
Miller said the particular classroom that Zeiger talked about is the type of classroom they have the biggest issues in.
“They’re the theater-style classrooms … that have slanted floors,” he said. “Our chairs don’t have cup holders, and there are so many people that just don’t understand or just haven’t figured it out — it’s not an issue of being negligent — but you put a cup of coffee or a soft drink on a slanted floor and if you don’t pay attention to it, over it goes.”
Miller said the combination of food and beverage, plus carpet underneath the seating area, is what makes those classrooms hard to maintain.
“If we just had carpet down the sides, and didn’t have carpet underneath the chairs – exactly like a movie theater, then we would be looking at a mop-up situation and cleaning hard floors as compared to having to get in with carpet extraction equipment,” Miller said.
He said one full-time employee could stay busy cleaning nothing but carpets in classrooms in the TLC, not even taking into account the public areas in the building.
Miller said although he doesn’t necessarily like receiving complaints like the one from Zeiger, he appreciates them, as they serve as an eye-opener.
“We’re definitely going to start to take a look at some strategic things that we can do,” Miller said. “We’re going to start working with the Registrar on scheduling classes … give us a break in certain classrooms on certain days, so that we can get in during the day with larger crews to do heavier duty work.”
Zeiger said maybe the complaint should go higher up the chain of command to administration.
“I don’t fault people like Mark Miller and those trying to assign and use three people to cover what takes, say, nine people to cover … The fault does not lie with them,” she said. “The fault lies much higher up the food chain. It is that when we start laying off people, or thinking we can do without these (labor) jobs, that there is actually a material impact from doing without that.”
Zeiger said “Vandal Pride” exists on all levels.
“We have a big to-do with banners all over campus,” she said. “People wear pins that say ‘Vandal Pride,’ and I’m looking at that going ‘Well pride about what? A football team?’ Come on, we’re bigger than that – we’re more than that.”