Once the school year ends, the air-conditioning is shut off on campus. What students might not realize is that the custodians still come to work and deep-clean the rooms.

“It’s really hot. It’s like muggy, sweaty hot, our clothes are wet because we work hard in the summer and then we don’t have cool down time,” head custodian Sophia Brown said.

Custodian Anthony Gonzalez recalled a summer from a couple of years ago when he was working.

“We had no AC and it was really hot,” he said. “It was really hard to work. We were sweating all the time and with the chemicals we were smelling it was difficult and dizzying. It was hard but we have to do. It’s our job.”

Gonzalez said his worst experience without AC was a couple of years ago during the summer.

“We were [cleaning] the locker rooms and it was pretty hot,” Gonzalez said. “We had to use the big fan that sometimes we use in the gym and the problem was that will all of the dust it was like a cloud of dust. We were breathing all of that it in. We were using masks, but at the same time, we had to go out for a while, come back because the cloud of dust was so bad. In the summer we do detail cleaning. It’s more of dusting so it was pretty, pretty hard for a week. That’s the worst that I’ve been without AC.”

Brown said working in the heat can be bothersome.

“I would like to have lunch and quiet time in a cooled area,” Brown said.

Gonzalez said he hopes that with the installation of the new AC system, the problems will be less frequent and not scattered throughout the campus.

“These buildings are old we have a lot of issues in different buildings with the AC,” Gonzalez said. “I hope with this new system we don’t have that problem. If we are going to have a problem it’s going to be one. They’re going to fix it and that’s it. Not Building 2 here, and buildings 3 and 4 on different days, all the time, because they’re different units.”

By Mackenzie Jerdon