Out of every room we enter and use daily, we have the highest standards for cleanliness in bathrooms. Think about it: they are the only rooms that are inevitably used by everyone and need to be cleaned more than two to three times a day.

No other room requires that kind of attention or gets as many complaints for being dirty. If you walked into a friend’s room and there were tissues scattered all over the floor you would think to yourself, “Oh wow, they have a messy room.” If you walked into a bathroom with tissues scattered all over, more would cross your mind.

The state of the De Anza College bathrooms and De Anza as a whole is surprisingly acceptable. If you factor in the sheer number of students  who pass through the bathrooms, the dining room, along with the physical education facilities and every other room with the limited staff and resources that custodial operations has, it is quite amazing that De Anza stays clean at all.

“I think De Anza is relatively clean,” said undecided major Jenn Lee Ripley. “I mean, there are schools in other places that have broken chairs, leaking roofs and dirty floors, so who are we to complain? A school is a school and it shouldn’t be judged by how clean it is, but rather by the merit of the teachers and students that it houses.”

Many people don’t give the custodial staff enough credit for all the work that they do for the school. We criticize them for not keeping the bathrooms clean or for letting trash float around campus, when the people we really need to criticize is ourselves. According to Manny Dasilva, manager of the custodial staff, De Anza only has 25 people on staff to clean the entire campus. It only takes one student to trash the entire campus, but it would take more than one person to clean it up.

The custodial staff must rely entirely on a limited budget. They are almost 100 percent green, whether it be with toilet paper, toilet paper dispensers, or the chemicals tused for cleaning. Ninety-five percent of the chemicals used to clean the campus are Environmental Protection Agency certified and completely harmless; the remaining five percent are used to remove graffiti.

Graffiti is the biggest problem the custodial staff has on campus. De Anza spends about $700 monthly on chemicals to clean up graffiti.

Upon learning this, the level of respect I had for the students here dropped. We are college students; we are adults. We should have the courtesy and decency to pick  up after ourselves and to not purposely deface school property. De Anza looks the way that it does because of the way the students treat it, not how the cleaning staff handles our messes.

“Treat this place like your home. Have respect for your fellow students and clean up after yourselves because this place is for all of us,” said Dasilva.

Looking back at De Anza twenty years ago, the cleanliness of our school now is something to be applauded. Our cleaning staff is more efficient and the chemicals used are safer, cleaner, more environmentally friendly and don’t have as much of a deteriorating effect on our buildings. We grow every day, and hopefully in the future, De Anza will become even more aesthetically pleasing.

“We strive to do the best job we can with the limited resources we have because we believe that our students deserve the best and cleanest environment to learn in,” said Dasilva.