The lunch bell rings and students take flight to their next class. Paths of trash are created making it pretty easy to locate where students were.

Littering has been a huge problem all around the United States and Akins High School is no exception.

“Three custodians can each easily each pick up two 33 gallon trash bags just after A lunch,” custodian Sandra Hernandez said.

Throughout the day each of the ten custodians can pick up two full bags with trash around the whole school, that’s approximately 660 gallons of trash everyday.

On top of all of the trash, students disrespect custodians on a daily basis. Some even throw trash on the floor on purpose.

“One day I was walking around and a student throws trash on the ground in front of me,” Hernandez said. “I told him to pick it up, but then he tells me, it’s your job so pick it up yourself.”

Custodians that work for Austin ISD on average get paid approximately ten dollars an hour depending on their position. Recently, the AISD school board heard a proposal to increase the minimum wage for the custodians to $11 per hour, which is still above the federally mandated rate of $7.25 per hour.

At press time a decision about the change had not been made.

“It gets me mad when I see students talk bad about custodians because when I was younger my dad was one to help us out,” senior Veronica Alba said. “They’re doing it for a living. They definitely deserve to be appreciated more.”

A custodian’s job consists of cleaning up the whole school including rest rooms used by over 2,000 students and on a daily basis handling dangerous chemicals.

Without custodians, students would be attending an unsanitary school with trash in each corner and yet, the average student would say that a janitor’s job is useless.

“Without custodians we would have a very dirty learning environment,” sophomore Ana Alvarado said. “Although it’s not a job people would normally prefer, somebody has to do it and we should be thankful for them.”