Have you ever eaten something in the hallway and left your trash behind? Or did you dry your hands in the bathroom and drop the paper towel on the floor? Who cleans these items up? Or have you noticed the shiny waxed floors, painted lockers, and washed blackboards? Who keeps our school clean and tidy? That would be the custodians, one of whom is a Tenafly High School graduate and new Night Foreman, Justin Dzadik. This job is essential and without Dzadik’s position, the building would be in disarray.
Generally, a custodian’s job is to keep whatever building they work at clean and keep up its maintenance, whether it’s a classroom, a cafeteria, the auditorium, or an office. What makes this hard is the messes left behind. It can vary from little wrappers being left behind to extreme bathroom accidents.
The job of a night foreman is one of the many custodian positions. This job usually starts after school hours, though the start and end times can change depending on the amount of work.
“At night, that’s when everything gets clean… so just running through and making sure all the rooms are presentable for the following day,” Dzadik said. “I will also try and do my best to go through any complaints. If something’s broken, I’ll try and fix it myself if I can. If not, I have to pass that on to the maintenance group and put in work orders for that,” he explained.
Dzadik was a half-day student of Tenafly High School and Bergen Tech. During his freshman and sophomore years, he would start at Bergen in the mornings and come to Tenafly for afternoon classes. “If you stick with your classes and you listen to your teachers, then it’s pretty relatively easy to pick up. Just like anything, the more you stick with it, you get better with it,” Dzadik said. At Bergen Tech, he took classes in history, general contracting, auto repair, and collision repair, and ended up majoring in landscaping. “There were hazards there. You did a beehive or something like that, they tend not to like that,” he said. After Bergen Tech, his schedule at Tenafly would alternate.
Ironically, he didn’t think that he would end up coming back to Tenafly High School. At first, he worked between Willow Run, the now closed nursery in Cresskill, and at Tenafly High School. He would start his mornings at Willow Run and end his nights at the High School. Eventually, he began to really enjoy his work at the high school and stuck with it after Willow Run was shut down.
He liked the work as a Tenafly custodian—the people and, overall, the close environment between all of the custodians. With his new promotion as night foreman, Dzadik is excited to see how well he will do making sure our building is kept in tip-top condition.
