SUMMER TIME MAKES SCHOOLS SHINE FOR NEW YEAR

Bruce LaPierre installed window film for earthquake protection on the windows at Louis J. Schultz Middle School. If the glass is broken, the film keeps fragments intact.

Robert Martin, a custodian at Louis J. Schultz Middle School, waxed the floor of the choral music room.

Charolyn Robison painted an exterior classroom door at Charles C. Clippard Elementary School.

Desks and chairs are stacked outside classrooms of Charles C. Clippard Elementary School so floors can be cleaned.

School buildings are constantly buzzing with activity.

For nine months of the year they are filled with students, teachers and administrators going about the business of education. For the other three, swarms of maintenance crews descend to erase the signs of heavy use and restore buildings to top shape for the start of school.

In the Cape Girardeau School District, a full-time staff of 44 custodians is supplemented by about another 40 people hired to apply fresh coats of paint where needed, take care of grounds and other duties.

What kind of shape are buildings in at the end of the school year?

"They are ready to be shut down and cleaned," said David Gragg, the district's facilities coordinator. "They get rode hard. There is not really much destruction, but they definitely need to be cleaned."

Cleaning entails a top-to-bottom scrubbing of all buildings, and waxing crews keep busy giving floors a nice shine.

"A major cleaning effort goes on during the summer," said Dr. Howard Jones, superintendent of the Jackson R-2 School District. "It takes hours and hours and hours of work."

Jones said the students generally show respect for school buildings.

"Having only been here for a year and a half, I'm impressed with the care the kids show," Jones said. "There is very little graffiti and other signs of disrespect. We're very proud of them."

The buildings themselves are not the only things that require tending.

"One of the really big areas is just the sheer number of grounds that have to be maintained during the summer," Jones said. Not just athletic fields but the lawns around buildings.

"When you look at all of the buildings in a typical school district, that's a lot of grass."

The Cape Girardeau district hires five full-time groundskeepers during the summer. "We try to keep the exteriors of buildings looking nice even during the summer months," Gragg said.

The summer break also provides the time to undertake capital improvement projects that would be difficult, if not impossible, to do when school is in session.

At Cape Girardeau's schools, crews are replacing air-conditioning units, fixing roofs and doing other projects, such as replacing the removable separation walls, once popular in schools, with permanent walls.

Thanks to a state grant, the district is undertaking a project to make its boilers more efficient. "Most of our boilers are pretty old," Gragg said.

In fact, considering the newest building in the district -- Charles Clippard Elementary School -- was built in 1964, more than just the boilers are pretty old.

"They constantly need to be maintained," Gragg said.

At Jackson crews are resurfacing playground areas and expanding the parking lot at the new middle school. Also, a portion of the roof of the music/vocational/agriculture buildings -- also known as the "B" building -- is being replaced.

New classrooms are being built in the old auto mechanics building, and the library at R.O. Hawkins Junior High is being completely refurbished.

"The kids will be greeted with a really attractive new library," Jones said. "That library hasn't been refurbished since the building was built in 1966.

"After seeing how much the students at the new middle school enjoyed going to the library when it was a pleasant place to be, we decided it was time to refurbish the junior high library."

Summer also provides the opportunity to convert rooms for other uses and make changes to ensure that the needs of the teacher and students using that room will be met.

Just before the end of the school year, Cape Girardeau teachers provide Gragg with lists of what needs to be done to their rooms.

"We don't get to do everything that everybody requests, but we try," Gragg said. "We just try to make the buildings the best we can for the kids. That's what we're here for."