Head Custodian Nicole Quiram Keeps the Facility running year 'round.
With the end of summer, students and staff return from the corners of Maple River to a familiar routine and building. Yet there are some staff members that never left, and in the early weeks of August, find themselves sprinting to a finish line: the custodians. Nicole Quiram is the leader of the custodial crew who organizes a deep cleaning of the entire building and then hastily puts humpty-dumpty back together again just in time for school to begin.
For Quiram, Maple River is not only her workplace but also her home. She’s seen plenty of changes–from witnessing school consolidation as a student to packing up the old buildings for the big move in 2022–and by choice, she’s stayed in the district to raise her own kids. “Maple River has just been great for raising families,” Quiram explains. While she worked several jobs after graduating from Maple River in 1991, she began working at Maple River as a custodial sub in 2015 and became a full-time custodian in 2016. She credits her co-workers during that time for not only getting her up to speed but also in preparing her to take charge. “Obviously, we have Lance Finch, who has been here the longest, and he's over 20 years in. And unfortunately, you know, we lost Dave Paal to Covid, and that was really rough. We lost Dan Meyer and Dan Schubbe to retirement, and when we lost those three people alone, we lost a ton of experience, a ton of knowledge.” Thanks to her mentors, Quiram quickly learned the hour-to-hour duties of a custodian and then began to learn the month-to-month and year-to-year skills in operating a building. “As I was progressing in that role, I was also learning little things from our lead custodians and our more experienced people on when an air handler would break at night, I would learn how to fix that. When we had a boiler problem, I would learn how to fix those or what we needed to do to restart like in the old building. Our boilers were ancient. So I basically learned from my position. I learned from experience, from all those people that we lost. So now I have to learn on my own.”
(Veteran custodian Lance Finch tends to the gym floors).
Having learned the skill of problem-solving at the old building, Quiram took those lessons and applied them to a new facility with new challenges. After facilitating the move from three buildings to one, Quiram immediately saw some of the perks to the new building. “I would say in going from the old facility to the new facility a huge difference is comfort. Another huge difference is being able to technologically advance our kids with what we can do with the spaces we have. Our shops are enormous in this building. We have updated equipment. We have a paint booth now. We have air conditioning in the entire facility, our science rooms, our chemistry spaces. They now have fume hoods for some of these chemicals that these kids work with to make things safer. Our air handlers in this building are all inside. In our old building, they were outside so multiple times a year, and depending on the weather you'd get out when you could to change the filters. I think I have two rooftop units now, which are above the shop and the rest are all inside. It’s been a huge difference, and it's better on our equipment.”
(Today's Task: delivering books to the elementary rooms)
Despite all the wondrous bells and whistles that came with a new facility, the need for problem-solving reached a whole other level for Quiram in the first two years of the building. “The biggest challenge that we do run into is that this building never sleeps, and that's great for the community. Like we want the community to be able to come enjoy these events. We want these kids to be able to come and utilize this facility because our taxpayers pay for this, and if these kids can use it, or people from the community in the winter come in and walk, we have a group of older men that come and play basketball at times, you know. So it's just awesome. But at times that is a big challenge. How do we juggle that and keep these floors clean and keep the walls clean? The space that we have here is so enormous; it takes time to clean these and keep them clean.” From adjusting the size of the building and the ridiculous amount of glass that needed cleaning, Quiram also had to manage the growing pains discovered after the opening of the building. “We had massive water leaks in our science wing. We finally got that figured out and fixed. So that leak is done. We're working out air handler issues, which are, you know, you gotta dial all this stuff in to get it work efficiently so the building doesn't feel humid. Our weather changes so drastically here that it's really hard to dial this stuff in because we don't have those consistent temps. Last year was a dry summer. We got a few rains, but we could never dial in those leaks. This year we got a ton of rain, and we were able to dial in those leaks. We still have a few we're working on, but as with any new building, you're going to have to work through those issues.”
Helping Quiram manage such a facility are a team of custodians with one special skill: versatility. “We're all still learning stuff as we go, even myself as we go, we're learning as we go. We get new equipment, we're learning. But my team is really good about training everybody on everything. I want everybody to know how to do everything. And there's some stuff that some people are better at than others, like some people are more experienced waxing floors. We waxed a ton of floors in the old buildings, but now in this new building, I really only have one or two people who have waxed quite a bit with us. We try to roll everybody into knowing how to do everything. There's a lot to learn in this new building, so I'm trying to learn it all and then pass it on to the rest of my staff.”
After decades of rotating from town to town during the summer, custodians spent their second “normal” summer focused on only one building. Yet there are still many lessons being learned along the way. “Summer for us is kind of exciting because everybody gets to go to a day shift. A lot of my guys work a night shift during the school year. It's also a little bit nerve wracking, because, as you know, this building never sleeps, so it's complete chaos. We really have to have a plan together when we start cleaning in the summer, and then it's just go time!” Despite the best laid plans, sometimes life throws in a curveball. “So we have summer school, so we try to get that elementary wing done first because then it's open for summer school. But we also have childcare that starts right after school, so we have just a little chunk that we have to leave until the end, and then from there, we either bounce to the middle and kind of do auditorium music wing, or as we learned this year, we did that, and then we ended up having some Thunder of Drums people stay here, so we kind of bounced around more than I would've liked. It was super crazy busy. So, I mean, we just kind of break it down into sections of the building. Usually the high school, middle school is the last end we do. Next year, we might do that before we do the middle and let those Thunder of Drums people work their way through.”
And ready or not, here they come. Having finished all the waxing, cleaning, and repairing, Quiram and her custodial staff are excited for the school year to start all over. “I love being around all the people. I love being around the kids, and I love seeing the community come in and see how nice the facility is and see how much they enjoy it. I love watching the parents come for the athletic events and they're sitting in this huge, wide open gym now, and we have this beautiful balcony they can sit and watch from.” Just like she enjoys watching students grow, she also realizes that she’s not done yet growing into the new building. “I keep joking that I give it a good five years before we maybe really have everything really dialed in good, and you're still going to be tweaking stuff. But, you know, I think from where we started when we moved into this building to where we're at now, we've made a huge amount of progress, and we're really starting to get things dialed in.”
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