Preparing campus for the new academic year

Campus Operations team pulls out all the stops

By Pete Fairbairn

As is the case with BGSU staff across virtually all areas and departments, Campus Operations has been keeping busy in preparation for the new academic year. In addition to their usual duties in the areas of facility maintenance and enhancements, sustainability and safety initiatives, the multifaceted and multitalented Campus Operations team pulled out all the stops throughout the summer to prepare campus for the hustle and bustle of fall semester. Their overarching goal: To ensure students, faculty, staff and guests are given a first-rate, well-maintained environment conducive to the University’s mission to cultivate the public good through public higher education.

Summer opportunity

While classes are held during summer session, there are far fewer students and faculty on campus, which gives Campus Operations the opportunity to get into some spaces for more involved work.

“We are able to ‘front load’ our work during the summer in advance of fall semester,” noted Assistant Vice President of Campus Operations Andrea Depinet. “It involves thorough cleaning, painting, preventative maintenance and a long list of heavier, dirtier work best done when relatively few students and faculty are on campus.”

In the case of the residence halls, the Campus Operations team springs into action as soon as students leave for the summer. Custodial takes care of preliminary cleaning, followed by a maintenance inspection, wiping down the mattresses and lofting more than 6,000 beds, and a separate team that cleans the carpet. Carpet cleaning alone is on a massive scale, with Campus Operations contracting and managing more than 475,000 square feet of carpet.

But the work is far from done at that point, as separate painting and preventative maintenance crews follow these deep cleaning and lofting tasks. The amount of work undertaken by the paint crews this past summer exceeded 4,300 labor hours in the residence halls alone.

“No room is touched less than five times throughout the summer, and often, rooms are touched more than that,” said Eric Heilmeier, director of campus services. “We’re not only preparing for the start of the school year, but we're also working with our colleagues in Conference and Events to flip the rooms for more than 30 summer conferences and camps.”

Scheduling challenge

All of this must be carefully choreographed to finish a wide array of mission-critical work by the various target dates, while maintaining the high-quality standards of the University. In addition, crews must be scheduled to finish all work in the proper sequence while avoiding too many things going on at the same time in the same location.

“Our scheduling has to be comprehensive to ensure everything gets done on time and in the correct order,” Depinet said. “You don't want to clean a space and then perform a maintenance task that creates a new mess that brings our custodial staff back in. The timing of each component of the work must be carefully scheduled to get things done correctly and efficiently. Otherwise, you're going to duplicate work and we don't have time for that.”

Event support

While the pace of on-campus events drastically increases in the fall, Campus Operations staff doesn’t take a break from events during the summer. The grounds crew, for example, began preparing the Bowen-Thompson Quadrangle for summer commencement just after spring commencement at the end of April.

In addition, Campus Operations closely coordinates with Admissions to make sure campus is at its best for summer orientation dates.

“We knew the dates of orientation and were able to do a large amount of work to beautify campus, including Lot 7,” Heilmeier said. “We wanted to make sure that when our tour guests walked into the Union for the first time, their impression of campus was positive.”

Staged for success

Front loading larger projects, deep cleaning and performing preventative maintenance during the summer months sets the stage for Campus Operations to stay on top of the day-to-day needs of the campus community at the beginning of the new academic year.

Just consider what the grounds crew maintains throughout the year: More than 400 acres of grass to be mowed and over 12 acres of landscape beds to maintain, in addition to 27 acres of athletic fields to manage. Once winter sets in, there are 88 acres of parking lots to plow, in addition to 39 miles of sidewalk and over five miles of roadway to keep clear and ice free.

Events proliferate, requiring expert, coordinated efforts by custodial, grounds and logistics crews. The maintenance team is continuously called upon to handle plumbing, electrical and mechanical issues involved with 3,500 pieces of HVAC equipment, 416 fire system devices, 98 elevators and much more. And, the night shift crew does an extraordinary job making sure public spaces are fresh and inviting for students, faculty, staff and guests every morning.