It’s about 3:30 p.m., and Omar the Custodian is making his rounds. He meticulously walks across the quad, tugging a rolling yellow trashcan along with him. After a few steps he stoops down. He is picking up trash – lots of it.

It was a sad sight to see when, on the first day that the lush, green grass was opened to students, it was almost immediately littered with plastic bags, bottles, papers and cans. Every day, there accumulates an ungodly amount of debris in the quad. It is puzzling that so few have bothered to care.
This is, of course, entirely typical of the Clayton student. Given so much privilege – a brand new $30 million wing, a beautiful park in the center of the campus – the Clayton student elects to blatantly insult every self-respecting taxpayer by carelessly leaving his trash on tables, chairs, and the ground.
This littering phenomenon shows an utter lack of regard for any of the time, effort and money spent to create this outrageously decadent school. It is almost as if Clayton students don’t realize that their abandoned garbage has to be picked up by someone, and that it is all too often custodians like Omar, making their rounds after school, who are left to do the dirty work.
All of this is made even more ridiculous by the fact that there are trash cans galore in the quad, so that one would barely have to walk 20 feet before encountering some sort of bin. Laziness is simply not an excuse.
What would happen if Omar stopped making his rounds? How much trash would accumulate before anyone took action? How long would it take? A week? Two weeks? A month?
Let’s not wait that long. The good thing about littering is that it is so easy to fix. It is an option, a simple choice between carelessness and character, between disrespect and morals. This is not a widespread problem – a relatively small number of students are responsible. But in a school of 850 students, it is pathetic that so few take the time to pick up trash, even if it is not theirs. Littering is just a symptom of the greater disease: the ideals of community and shared responsibility have gone completely out the window.
This seems to be the perfect initiative for Green Club or Community Service Club, but neither has taken action. This seems to be something that the administration would find disgusting, but it has yet to find a solution. For now, it is up to the custodians to clean up our mess, to pick up the remnants of our disrespect and youthful idiocy. But that just isn’t the way it should be. Until Omar can put his rolling yellow trashcan to rest, this staff will continue to be deeply concerned about the cleanliness of our school and, most importantly, the poor health of the Clayton character and the Clayton community.