Teach, Teach, Teach, Now Clear the Lunch Tables!

Orange Elementary School's "Connect" teachers required to help clean up the cafeteria.

Editor’s Note: The article originally appeared at Byrd Street. Subscribe to Byrd Street for more news about Orange County.

By Hilary Holladay

The week before school began in Orange County, all five members of Orange Elementary School’s Connect staff found out they’d be clearing cafeteria tables on top of their professional duties. The Connect faculty comprises the school librarian, an IT professional, and teachers of art, music, and physical education.

According to a confidential source, each of the five Connect staffers is assigned a day to work in the school cafeteria for an hour and 45 minutes. During their assigned blocks, they step away from their usual duties to clear tables of trash and crumbs. Then they go back to teaching or other professional tasks.

On the four days when Byrd Street’s source is not expected to gather up crumbs and crumpled napkins, this individual teaches six classes in a row—an intense workload the source describes as “grueling.”

The source said that OES Assistant Principal Kaitlyn Fake announced the additional responsibilities to the Connect teachers just days before the new school year began. Not long thereafter, OES Principal Lawyer Johnson optimistically told the group that helping to clean up the cafeteria would be a good opportunity to get to know students.

Instructional assistants also have table-clearing duties at Orange Elementary School, Byrd Street’s source said. The source added that homeroom teachers may have done this chore in the past, perhaps as recently as the previous school year. (Byrd Street has not yet determined whether this practice is in place elsewhere in the school division.)

In response to Byrd Street’s request for comment, Orange County Superintendent of Schools Dr. Daniel Hornick wrote, “We have not received concerns regarding this matter and stress the importance of staff bringing forward legitimate concerns via the appropriate channel to building leadership. As a point of clarification, we do not utilize teachers or other employee groups as replacements or substitutes for custodians. Additionally, we added custodial personnel to OES in FY25.”

One wonders why OES teachers must clear lunch tables if the school has recently added custodians. Are there still not enough? And if the Connect teachers aren’t serving as custodial replacements or substitutes, what exactly should we call them when they’re disposing of trash and cleaning up tabletop messes? Pinch-hitters? Future employees of Louisa County Public Schools?

One also wonders why the administration waited until the week before school started to add cleanup to the OES Connect teachers’ workload. With just a few days before the new school year began, in a time of nationwide economic uncertainty, these teachers may have felt they had no choice but to comply with the new directive.

Custodial work is an honorable way to earn a living. It takes attention to detail and professionalism, and the people who are good at it deserve more pay and more gratitude that they typically get. But a custodian’s job description doesn’t include the college degree or professional certification that Virginia public school teachers generally must have. Because of that, and because the Connect staffers were given so little notice, it strikes me as demeaning that each of them must clean up after students for the better part of two hours week after week. Even if they haven’t complained to their principal, the professional discourtesy, and the misuse of their education and skills, is there for all to see.

Local Obituaries

To view local obituaries or to send a note to family and loved ones, please visit the link that follows.

Support Award-winning, Locally Focused Journalism

The FXBG Advance cuts through the talking points to deliver both incisive and informative news about the issues, people, and organizations that daily affect your life. And we do it in a multi-partisan format that has no equal in this region. Over the past year, our reporting was:

• First to break the story of Stafford Board of Supervisors dismissing a citizen library board member for “misconduct,” without informing the citizen or explaining what the person allegedly did wrong.

• First to explain falling water levels in the Rappahannock Canal.

• First to detail controversial traffic numbers submitted by Stafford staff on the Buc-ee’s project

Our media group also offers the most-extensive election coverage in the region and regular columnists like:

• Drew Gallagher — Humorist

• Dennis Wemm — Theatre Critic

• Hank Silverberg — Transportation

• Bruce Saller — Environment

• Loraine Paige — Food and Business

And our newsroom is led by the most-experienced and most-awarded journalists in the region — Adele Uphaus (Managing Editor and multiple VPA award-winner) and Martin Davis (Editor-in-Chief, 2022 Opinion Writer of the Year in Virginia and more than 25 years reporting from around the country and the world).

• For just $8 a month, you can help support top-flight journalism that puts people over policies.

Your contributions 100% support our journalists.

Help us as we continue to grow!

This article is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. It can be distributed for noncommercial purposes and must include the following: “Published with permission by FXBG Advance.”