In the opinion of some students, trash has become a problem inside and outside the school. Some have claimed to have seen cockroaches in classrooms and rodents in the cafeteria. And yet janitors and teachers seem to mostly believe that the trash situation is not bad at all, considering that EHS is such a big school that serves 2300 students a day. So, who’s right?  Are the claims true? Does Everett High really have a trash problem? 

“We’ve got it under control,” custodian Nick Nuzzo said. “I mean we have a lot of trash as you know, but we use 100 trash bags a day so that’s all I can say and do.”

“As far as I can tell, it seems that the trash barrels get emptied in my classroom every day,” math teacher Debbie DiMare said. “I haven’t been down in the cafe to notice, so from my point of view there isn’t a trash problem”.

“I personally don’t feel like there’s a trash problem at school,” English teacher Staci Fleury said.  “My classroom’s on the 5th floor, my trash gets taken out every day. Maybe my world at Everett High is very small but I don’t see a trash problem,” Fleury said.

For those that do see a problem though, the real issue is that students don’t clean up after themselves. 

“The students should help clean the school since they are mostly the ones causing the trash problem,” junior Achena Sanon said. “There are some students who are purposely making more trash in the school, so I feel like they should take part to clean up the trash.” 

Another thing that has caused problems in the past is when students take food out of the cafeteria.

“If people continue to take food out of the cafeteria and bring it around school and leave it all over the place, it will attract rodents,” Nuzzo said. “We had that problem last year too, kids would eat in the gym, the classrooms, even in the library, and that is why we had the issue in the first place.”

Despite the difficulties of the custodians’ job, which include lots of hard work and not enough appreciation, some manage to approach it with a sense of humor. 

“How do you prevent trash though? If you prevent trash, I will lose my job,” Nuzzo said.