NPR – Owen Phillips
“Back in 2011, Newt Gingrich was running for president, and he proposed a radical idea to help schools cut costs: Fire the janitors and pay students to do the cleaning. Needless to say, the idea to turn students into moonlighting janitors had about as much support as Gingrich’s presidential campaign. But ask Kim De Costa and she’ll say there isn’t anything radical about asking students to clean up after themselves. At her school, there are no janitors. Instead, students in grades 6-12 meet in teams once or twice a week to clean assigned areas. De Costa is the executive director of the Armadillo Technical Institute. It’s a public charter school in Phoenix, Ore., a few miles from the California border. For 30 minutes after lunch, students sweep, mop, take out the trash and even clean the bathrooms — but responsibilities rotate so no one is stuck scrubbing toilets more than two or three times a year. De Costa says it’s easy to encourage students to respect their environment when they’re the ones responsible for preserving it.”(more)