CHS is a school of many things. It is a school of culture, diversity, creativity, music, athletics and so much more. There is one aspect that CHS should and could be about and that is cleanliness. During lunch, especially in the courtyards, students leave a lot of trash around. The courtyards look very bad after lunch and it gives janitors more work than what they are supposed to be doing. School bathrooms are also a big problem that janitors have to deal with. Why do some students not throw their trash away? How do janitors feel about cleaning the dirty bathrooms and cleaning students’ trash everywhere?, and also how CHS could potentially fix this problem and encourage students to do better? 

Many CHS students have a problem with not throwing their trash away and this does not help with trying to make CHS a school about cleanliness. High school students are old enough to know what they are supposed to do with their trash, but just leaving it where they ate is not right. Students leaving their trash completely isn’t the right thing to do at CHS and it also makes a janitor’s job way harder than it should be. There could be a couple of reasons why a student would leave their trash for someone else, but it could simply be because they just don’t care. Ben Rekosh, co-host of the Paper Thin Thoughts Podcast had a say in this question. He said, “I think students don’t throw their trash away because of laziness.” Students may think that their trash is not their problem and that a janitor is supposed to clean after them, but they don’t know how much a janitor has to do. 

A janitor’s job can already come with its hardships. They have to clean up trash left behind by students, clean up bathrooms, clean drink spills, be the last people to leave school every day, and a lot more. At CHS, a janitor’s job gets nowhere near being easier. The problems just add to a janitor’s already stressful job. They have the hardest job in school but are the least taken care of. Carlos Ragley, a CHS janitor, was asked if he found it annoying to be picking up trash after high school students. He replied with “Yes, it’s annoying because you would think that they would throw their trash away but they just act like elementary school students.” High school students being compared to elementary students is a problem within itself because they shouldn’t be compared in regards to who throws trash away better. Janitors should not have to pick up a lot of trash and they especially should not have to clean up dirty bathrooms.  

CHS should take drastic measures to try to fix this problem. The bathrooms and the courtyards are very dirty and there need to be new ways to encourage students to clean up after themselves. Ben Rekosh when asked what ways CHS could help stop this problem, he responded with “Providing more access and a higher quantity of trash cans and maybe also providing incentives for having the cleanest lunch.” Having incentives would be a great idea to get students to clean for prizes, but there should be consequences for not doing the simple task of cleaning after yourself. Maybe there could be a club that prioritizes keeping the school clean and working with the janitors to accomplish that. It can even be for the simple reason of just being respectful to the school and to the janitors. Carlos Ragley had his say about how he would encourage students to throw their trash away and it was a simple way. He said, “Treat the school like how you would treat your house.” If students would treat the school like how they would treat their house, then the school wouldn’t have this problem right now. All of these things could bring students together to make CHS a better place.