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For the past 26 years, Foothill High School head custodian Richard Leal has had the same routine.
Wake up at 3 a.m. to commute from his home in Brentwood, go to the gym — if traffic doesn’t set him behind — to warm up his body and get to the Pleasanton school 15 minutes before his shift starts at 6 a.m.
He opens all of the gates to Foothill, cleans the swimming pool and checks its chemical levels, cleans the gyms and takes care of any little things along the way — all before any student steps foot on campus.
“I’ve done 11,000 steps in three and a half hours of working,” Leal told the Pleasanton Weekly the day before school started last week. “Normal days it’s about 20,000 by lunch.”
He is just one of the many Pleasanton Unified School District custodians who work behind the scenes to not only maintain the school they work at, but also spend their entire summer at the school to deep clean, move things around and make sure everything is in order for when teachers, students and other staff return from their break.
Leal, who was named as the 2024 Classified Employee of the Year recently by the district, has been at Foothill for the last 31 years. He started on the night shift before switching to the day shift.
During that time, he has grown so attached to the school that he now sees it as his second home as he knows where everything is located.
“This is just like my house, only way bigger,” Leal said.
On a normal school day, he goes through his routine of opening the school and making his rounds. But just like the other custodians, summer is crunch time.
“At the beginning of the summer, you start thinking ‘OK I hope the school is ready when the first day comes,'” Gerardo Flores, the head custodian at Fairlands Elementary School told the Weekly. “I think we accomplished that goal.”
Flores explained how at the elementary school level, custodians start cleaning from the bottom of each classroom and work their way up. They clean every desk and chair, dust all the areas, clean and wax the floors and even clean some of the sidewalks.
While it might be different for Leal at the high school level, where he and his team have to deep clean a much larger school, the goal is still the same — make everything spotless for the first day back.
Leal said the last week before school starts is especially hard because they have freshman orientation that they have to set up, they have teachers asking for desks and chairs as their class sizes change and they have new equipment that they have to bring in or replace like the lightbulbs — he said they replaced around 1,200 lightbulbs at Foothill this summer.
But as much as Leal ran around the school drenched in sweat this summer, he said he knows how important the work he and other custodians are doing for the students’ education. Even if he has to be at the school sometimes before the sun even comes out.
“I started a few minutes early, but (it was) no big deal,” Leal said on Aug. 7. “It’s just one of those things that you have to get done before all the kids get here.”
Just like Leal, other PUSD custodians like Flores also recognized the critical role they play in running a successful school district.
Flores, who came to the U.S. from El Salvador with his parents in the 1970s, said that after working at the post office in Pleasanton for 31 years, he had retired but was asked by a friend to help out with custodial work for a couple of hours. He said four hours turned to eight, which turned to a full 40 hour workweek.
He has now been at Fairlands for five years and said that he continues to do the work even at his age — he is 65 years old — because he wants to continue to serve his community.
“I just try to give back to the community because I have received so much,” he said. “This is one way I can give back to the community.”
He also said he enjoys the job because of the kids and how well he is able to connect with them.
“When you have 700 kids telling you happy birthday, that’s quite awesome,” he said.
Leal similarly said he has thought about switching to Amador Valley High School but hasn’t done so because of the connections he has made with people at Foothill.
But being a custodian isn’t just about talking with kids, cleaning up vomit or battling with the crows that team up to spread garbage out of the bins — as is the case with Foothill, according to Leal.
He said it’s also about being the first ones at the school to make sure everything is safe and being the last one out at 11 p.m. to make sure the school is clear of any possible dangers.
“You’re kind of the first person here, so you have to take care of it,” Leal said.
Flores highlighted the incident at Fairlands last year where a transient man jumped the fence and walked into an open door while the custodians were cleaning, camping out in one of the rooms upstairs before an employee discovered him the next morning.
Flores said while some people might think there is a need for more custodians so that won’t happen again, he said that might only mean there would be an additional person to make that same mistake of leaving the door open. He said instead, the district is emphasizing that custodians close and lock all doors whenever they are at a school site.
While Flores said that was an isolated incident he has never seen before, Stacey Leal — the head custodian at Harvest Park Middle School — said custodians are the first people to flag down first responders during emergencies.
That’s why she makes it clear that they are not just janitors and that the role of custodians goes far beyond just cleaning.
“There’s a huge difference … we go beyond the call of duty,” she said. “I call us the unsung heroes of our schools.”
Stacey Leal (who is not related to Richard Leal) has been with PUSD for over 20 years and has also been waking up early in the morning to make the commute from Manteca in order to get to her school at 6 a.m.
She started at Harvest Park, moved to Hart Middle School for a while, but came back to Harvest Park.
The district’s adult education program also hired her to teach their custodial academy where she trains people to become custodians. It’s there where she makes sure future custodians know just how important their job is to the district.
She said apart from all the work they do during the school year to maintain the school, the grueling work that they do during the summer goes to show how much time and effort custodians put toward making sure students and teachers can focus on what matters the most: the student’s education.
“You guys go on vacation and you enjoy yourselves, but we’re deep cleaning (the school) to make sure it’s good for the next school year,” Stacey Leal said.
She said while custodians might not seem like an integral part of the school’s ecosystem at first glance, they are in fact one of the most important factors in making sure students get the best school experience.
“You have to be the teacher’s eyes in the morning,” she said. “We’re the ones that made the classroom look the way it is.”
