You are missing something. In all of your decisions, throughout all of the school board meetings, all I ever hear about is numbers. You reduce everything to numbers. My intelligence has a number, how much I've learned in your educational system has a number, you consider the people that work in the school system in terms of how they effect your budget, even I am a number. 168148, to be precise. But guess what? These are PEOPLE. To me, the custodians that work in our schools are not simply parts of the single entity "custodial staff." They all have names and faces and personalities. Our custodians are the hardest working, most helpful people in my high school. Last year the Lely Shakespeare Academy put together a play with rehearsals going late into the night. Every day there was someone there to lock the doors after we left, to vacuum the floors, to take out the trash. One custodian in particular, Bernardo, stayed with us until late at night, sometimes even past eleven, even on weekends! Another example: a few years ago all the roofs in Lely were replaced. Some workers decided to go to lunch while re-roofing my father's classroom the Friday before the start of the school year. It rained. When my father walked into his classroom, a veritable waterfall was cascading across his bookshelves through the ceiling. First he contacted the principal, who merely offered his condolences. Then he called our plant-manager who immediately rushed most of the custodial staff in the school to his room, preventing thousands of dollars of damage to personal and school property. By that Monday, our plant manager managed to get the entire room sanitized and re-carpeted. Too bad she was forced to resign under extreme duress from the administration of my school. You almost always seem to talk about respect. How we should wiggle our fingers in the air because a standing ovation is disrespectful. Buy YOU need to learn RESPECT for our custodians, the people that stay in our school from 5:30 in the morning until 11:30 at night! The people that help faculty in ways no one else can. RESPECT for each individual, and how hard they work to keep our schools clean! What you are going to do throws all of their hard work, every piece of filth they've scrubbed off the walls of the student bathrooms back in their faces! RESPECT our custodians and don't ask them all to reapply for jobs they've held for 20 years to MAYBE, if they're lucky, get less pay and no benefits. Benjamin Dwyer