Done with the dirt Lack of janitors force students to clean up their own classroom

Tim Toton Opinion Editor

At promptly 10 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 29, the entirety of Pierce instructor Kim Rich’s criminal justice class instituted the first top-to-bottom scrubbing the Village 8330 classroom has known in her time teaching there.

Rich, who has been in the temporary Village structures for four years, said that the only type of janitorial support she receives from Facilities staff is the emptying of trash cans.

“We were only supposed to be out here [in the Village] for a year, then it became two, three, four,” Rich said. “Half the stuff doesn’t work. We’re just kind of out here.”

Fed up with the dirty work environment, Rich spent $200 of her own money on brooms, longhandled deck scrubbers, blue Nitrile gloves, Mr. Clean Magic Erasers, muck buckets, a variety of liquid cleaners, donuts and candy and asked her students to help clean the classroom after their quiz – and they did, she said.

Working a deck scrubber against the tired plastic thatch wallpaper covered in bits of gum and dark mystery fingers of dried liquid was

Jesse Cortez, who has been taking Rich’s classes in the Village for two years and hadn’t seen any improvement before their cleaning..

“It’s pretty disgusting,” Cortez said. “It’s always been like this.”

Also helping out her classmates was Samira Noorzad, an 18-year-old criminal justice major, who was cleaning the door that leads outside to the soccer fields, which is blamed for some of the mess.

“I didn’t even think it was this dirty until I started cleaning. It’s really gross,” Noorzad said. “Some classes have carpet, so imagine how dirty that is.”

[See DIRT, pg. 4 | See PHOTO ESSAY, pg. 6]

Vice President of Administrative Services Rolf Schleicher served a 30-day eviction notice on July 10, 2013, according to public documents.

The owners of Asylum, Robert and Cathy McBroom, hired legal counsel Roger Stanard, who demanded in a July 19 response letter that the notice be retracted:

Even if the contract can be interpreted to have expired on December 31, 2012, the interim contract was renewed by operation of law in accordance with Civil Code §1945 … if a leasee continues to occupy the leased premises after the expiration of the hiring, and the landlord accepts rent, the parties have presumed to have renewed the hiring on the same terms and for the same period of time.

Stanard said later in an interview that Best, Best & Kreiger, which represents the college and LACCD, has offered to mediate the matter and that the McBrooms have