Melissa Bailey Photos
After laying 10 coats of wax on the floors of the Nathan Hale School, and wiping off the marks of a hurricane, Licia Altieri got a first chance Thursday to see if her work would hold up under the long-awaited “stampede.”
Altieri, who’s 43, is the lead custodian at the school, which serves 553 kids in grades pre‑K to 8 at 480 Townsend Ave. She worked all summer to prepare for the flood of students who returned Thursday for the first day of school — then worked all weekend to keep it clean amid last-minute visits from hurricane emergency crews.
Kids poured in the door at 7:30 a.m. as 18,000 of the city’s 20,000 students returned to school Thursday. The effort to finish cleaning the schools before their arrival posed an extra challenge this year as a hurricane knocked out power in 13 schools and sent refugees sleeping in others. Three schools that had lost power due to Hurricane Irene will start school Friday, when kindergarten returns. Pre‑K starts Tuesday.
Wearing a pink Aerosmith t‑shirt, matching Nike sneakers and a Motorola walkie talkie in her belt, Altieri paced through the school Thursday cleaning up cereal boxes, making last-minute vacuum runs, and helping returning teachers find a door stop or a desk. Hers is the type of quiet, behind-the-scenes labor that schools depend on to keep running on the critical first day.
Except Altieri isn’t quiet. The custodian, who first came to Nathan Hale four years ago, welcomes teachers back with a boisterous hello. She’s known for logging miles around the school at an unrelenting clip, stopping only to crack a joke or tease her favorite kid or teacher.
“Good luck trying to follow her around,” warned Principal Lucia Paolella as the Independent set out behind Altieri on the cleanup beat.
When Altieri set out Thursday, she had already been working 10 days in a row: She spent the weekend on an unexpected hurricane detail, when her school opened up as an emergency operations staging area for firefighters, police and the National Guard. She was at a bridal shower Saturday when she got called into the school. During her two shifts, 4 p.m. to midnight Saturday and 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday, she kept busy picking up pizza boxes, rolling out a reheater for the leftovers, emptying trash bins and sweeping her freshly waxed floors.
“They look good,” she said Thursday, inspecting the floor in the school cafeteria, where most of the emergency responders had been hanging out. There was only one mark from a firefighter’s boot that she couldn’t remove.
The hurricane added a extra pressure to an already tight timeframe to clean schools, said Chief Operating Officer Will Clark. Custodians at schools that hosted summer programs (Nathan Hale didn’t this year) faced a two-week window to clean up before students hit the halls. Overall, 160 custodians had to clean 4 million square feet of school, he said. When 13 schools lost power over the weekend, that “further shrunk that time.”
Some custodians worked in shifts over the weekend to staff Nathan Hale and two emergency shelters during the hurricane. During the week, a crew of 25 to 30 custodians whose schools didn’t have power worked a “hurricane detail,” cleaning up, delivering food to shelters, and cleaning up trees strewn by the storm.
“Whatever needed to be done, everybody swung into action to get it done,” Clark said.
Altieri began the day at 7 a.m. Thursday by grabbing the walkie talkie from the main office and setting out to turn on all the lights. Then she unwrapped a package from a front office desk drawer: “A brand new Old Glory I saved for the first day of school,” she explained.
“Old Glory’s gotta go up,” she said, heading outside to the flagpole by the older half of the school. She hoisted the flag toward the sky as the morning sun hit the school’s brick facade.
As head custodian, Altieri is in charge of keeping the entire building clean and comfortable during the day. (A three-person crew also cleans up after hours.) She said she used to have five young summer assistants to help clean the school. Instead, she spent the summer working 9 to 5 by herself. She laid down 10 coats of wax in all the hallways and seven coats in the classrooms. “And 99 percent of that I did myself.” She also power-washed the bathroom walls.
She used to have a coworker during the school year, but that position was eliminated last year.
“I lost 20 pounds” running around the school after her coworker left, she said.
Which is not to say Altieri can’t handle it. She said she grew up as No. 9 of 11 kids in an Italian family squeezed in one tiny house in East Haven. “I shared a bedroom with seven girls,” she said. “There’s nothing I haven’t been through.”
Altieri hoped for a calm day Thursday and braced for the worst. She watched at 7:30 a.m. as the doors to the school opened.
“Here’s the stampede!” she said.
Kids poured into the cafeteria to pick up prepackaged meals of cereal and milk.
When they left, those waxed floors were barely worse for the wear, Altieri noted with pride. She credited a new type of wax made by Hillyard for making the difference.
“It smells good, too,” she remarked.
In a morning announcement, Principal Paolella declared it would be a “sparkling day.”
Altieri moved on to picking up the trash out of the bins she had set out in the cafeteria, each lined with at least four plastic bags. (“It saves a lot of time cleaning barrels,” when discarded juice leaks through a single bag.)
She picked up the first bag to test its weight. “They don’t drink the milk,” she observed, feeling the heft of the liquid. She hauled the trash to bigger bins outside, then headed out on the classroom loop. Only the older kids eat breakfast in the school caf; the younger ones eat inside their classrooms.
The youngest kids at Nathan Hale aren’t much older than the grandchild Altieri takes care of at home. Just like at home, Altieri gets called in when the kids or wet their seats, especially the first week of school.
Altieri started working as a custodian 16 years ago, when her husband died of a brain tumor, leaving her to raise two kids, ages 3 and 5. She said she left a career in food services for the job because of the benefits. (Years after landing the custodian job, she married an Altieri, who’s a distant cousin of former city budget director Frank Altieri.)
At a 1st-grade classroom, paraprofessional Gail Montagna (pictured) had just finished showing her little ones how to throw out their trash.
“First day, no spills!” she announced to Altieri.
As she made her circuit, Altieri picked up requests from teachers and staff along the way.
“That clock is going to drive me bonkers,” said paraprofessional Lucy Prokop, who was sitting inside her kindergarten classroom readying a bus schedule. She pointed to a stopped wall clock next to cardboard cutouts of SpongeBob SquarePants characters.
“I’ll give you my clock,” Altieri offered, and popped into her janitor’s room to get it.
“Too late — I gave it away already,” Altieri said. She promised to put it on her list of maintenance requests. She said her room is the only one in the building she didn’t get a chance to clean this summer — “too much to do.”
In the school library, which features a WPA-era mural salvaged from a dark hallway, the librarian asked why the soap wasn’t coming out of the dispenser.
“You gotta pump it hard,” advised Altieri. “The air has to mix with it.”
Down the hall, where 2nd-graders were opening math books, Principal Paolella reported from the doorway that the class was too warm inside. Altieri said she couldn’t fix that right away — she has to call down to a central office where staff can remotely manage each classroom temperature.
When another teacher asked for a door stop, Altieri opened a fire extinguisher case and revealed a secret stash of wooden wedges.
Another teacher, new to the school, asked for another desk for a special ed classroom. Altieri promised to fish one out of the basement using her trusty desk-mover, which slips underneath desks and lifts them up on wheels.
“Are you ready?” she radioed over to Sal Punzo, an administrator who doubles as a heavy lifter when need be.
She wheeled her desk-lifter around a tight corner, making a clanging sound on the metal door frame.
“Sorry, Mr. Door,” Altieri said.
She and Punzo slid the desk onto the lifter, wheeled it onto the elevator and into a special education classroom next to a brightly colored reading mat.
“The desk is in your room,” Altieri announced to a passing teacher who shares the room.
“That’ll make the teacher very happy,” came the reply.
In the cafeteria, Altieri again bumped into Principal Paolella, who was running an orientation for kindergarten parents.
“She’s in charge,” Paolella said of her head custodian. “She’s constantly working. She puts all of her energy here.”
“And she’s fun to work with, too,” Paolella added.
Before she could catch her breath, Altieri was dispatched on another mission from an assistant principal: “Can you vacuum my room?” The office had apparently been overlooked by the night crew.
On the way up, Altieri stopped to pick up a piece of tinsel on the elevator floor. She wondered aloud where it came from.
She wheeled a red Heavy-Duty Perfect vacuum down the science wing to the assistant principal’s office.
“Let’s close the door,” she said, not wanting to disturb the students who were studying across the hall.
As she pushed the Perfect into the final corner of the office, she found a clue — more tinsel! — and a reason to take a rest. With no other calls on the walkie-talkie, she could catch her breath again.
That is, before the first lunch wave hit, sending another stampede over those freshly waxed floors.
More often, we hear about custodians who aren't meeting even minimal standards for doing their jobs. It was a pleasure to read about Mrs. Altieri who works tirelessly for her school, and she does it with personal warmth.