Dedicated Staff Keep Schools Looking, Working Great Year-Round
John Conder is a 28 year veteran of DMPS, and an expert on how to keep a school looking and working great.
Think you’ve got a bottomless to-do list at home?
Imagine how long it might stretch if there were 20+ rooms and hundreds of people coming and going every day. Just about the time you get done scrubbing the floors a blizzard blows through and it’s time to plow the driveway and the driveway is actually a parking lot. And there are lots of toilets. And the kitchen and dining room are commensurate in size and scope. So are the heating and air conditioning systems. And on and on.
But it’s all part of the pride and privilege of home ownership, right? All of the choring amounts to a labor of love. And so it is with the DMPS Corps of Custodians. If you think their work slows down once school lets out think again. An empty building is like a blank canvas; an opportunity to really get some work done!
Take John Conder at Phillips Traditional School for instance. He’s been there for 21 years now, the first seven as Asst. Engineer and the last 14 as Chief Engineer. Those stints were separated by five years when he was keeping things running smoothly across town at Hanawalt Elementary School. Now he’s a senior staffer at Phillips. And nobody cares more about the place than he does. Also among his stops during 28 years of service to the district are brief ones at Oak Park Elementary, Harding Middle School and old Tech High (home of the Engineers), the schools he attended growing up in Des Moines before graduating from Tech, now Central Campus, in 1982.
“It’s a great old building,” Conder says of Phillips while polishing the tiled main floor before moving upstairs to buff the hardwood surfaces up there. The hallways are crammed with equipment and furniture and elsewhere in the building electricians are at work installing smart boards in classrooms. Next month the painters are coming. It all looks and feels overwhelming but Conder smiles bashfully when you say so because he knows how to get things done. That’s his job. And what are its rewards?
“Well, one day toward the end of this year a 5th grader came up to me in the cafeteria at lunchtime,” Conder confides, again with that bashful grin. “He stuck out his hand and said, ‘Thank you, Mr. Conder, for everything you do around here.’ That made me feel pretty good. People notice, I guess.”
Yes, they do.
“He’s the best there is,” is how Principal Laurel Prior-Sweet describes Conder. She’s been his boss for nearly a decade but has been transferred from Phillips to Monroe for next year. As tough a transition as that can be for a school community it could be worse. What if the guy who keeps the place open for business was leaving, too?
It’s not unusual for teachers to run into former pupils out and about in the community. But it happens to support staff, too. “Sometimes kids come up on the street and say ‘hello’ and I can’t even recognize them because they’ve grown up so much,” Conder admits. “But it’s nice they sometimes recognize me.”
If not surprising. For all his bashfulness Conder’s really a people person. Ask him if teachers ever make requests for a new touch in their classrooms on their ways out the door at the end of the year and he tells you that they usually just ask him how they can help make his summer work easier before they go. “They’re a great bunch of people to work with,” he says. “We’re really like a family here.”
And he’s the one in the family who gets to work at 4:00 AM in the middle of the winter so the others will have a place to park their cars and the kids will have clear paths inside. Or is the first to show up the morning after a summer thunderstorm knocks out the power overnight, as the case may be. He’s the housekeeper/handyman/troubleshooter for hundreds. He’s the one who sees to it that every teacher and every student in his building literally starts every year with clean slates. He’s the one that some who don’t know better might underappreciate as just a janitor but if you ask him how he would answer the question “What do you do for a living?” he loses the bashful grin and promptly, proudly says “I’m an Operations Engineer for the Des Moines Public Schools.” And he leaves it for those who do know better to add that he’s a very good one.
So yes, you can take John Conder at Phillips for instance. He’s a good example. You might even take him and his counterparts at the district’s 60+ schools for granted. But you shouldn’t. Follow the example of that Phillips 5th grader and thank them instead.
