January 11th...“WERE YOU EVER FEATURED ON A LOCAL EVENING NEWS TELEVISION BROADCAST?”
During the happy tenure of my 31 years with the Battle Ground School District, I became known as “The Singing Custodian”.
It was in early February of 1980, that I received a phone call at our school office one day. The person on the other end of this conversation was one of the Producers from the CBS Television affiliate station in Portland, Oregon known as KOIN-TV. He wanted permission from our Principal and myself to come to our school to film me singing to our students for broadcast on their evening news that day.
It is interesting what brought about that phone call from the TV station. There had been a couple of newspaper articles that were written about my “singing and cleaning curriculum”. I enjoyed rewarding the students with a song, story, fun toy sharing or other enjoyable activity with the little ones to ‘pay’ them for helping me keep our school clean.
Here’s how my “cleaning curriculum” worked. Each day after school, I would inspect the classrooms as I cleaned. If the students achieved my three core cleaning goals, I’d draw a smiley face on their chalkboard which equaled a reward of three minutes of happy time with this old custodian. Five smiley faces for the entire week would garner them a full 15 minutes of song, play or story time as my way of saying THANK YOU for making my cleaning life easier. I would then pay a visit to participating classrooms on my one hour, personal lunch break once a week to ‘pay’ what I owed to my little pals. 😉
A Video Cameraman who worked for KOIN-TV had taken one of my newspaper articles into the Portland, Oregon television station with him to show his superior. As I spoke with the videographer after the filming, he told me that he had approached his co-worker this way, “Hey Boss, instead of covering all the sad news in our area; you know…killings, robberies, etc………., let’s go out to Glenwood Heights Elementary School in the Battle Ground School District and do a happy story about this guy who is a singing custodian!” Well, the supervisor agreed, and after getting permission from our school office, they arrived to set up cameras and do an interview along with capturing me ‘on stage’ with some singing and guitar time in a classroom.
One of our 4th Grade teachers (Mr. Steve Rees) was so kind to allow us to do the filming segment in his classroom. Those great students and myself sure had a blast of a good time as I went through my ‘show’ for this special audience of Glenwood “Cubbies”.
My heart has always had an affection for the beautiful time of life for children between Kindergarten and 4th Grade. Their life experiences are still brand new to them and they are thrilled to enjoy every minute of every day!! I was ‘tickled pink’ to be a musically fun part of their daily lives in a more personal way, rather than just be an ‘invisible person’ that only comes in after school to clean. I hope some of these dear little souls have positive reflections of their custodian from those days in the long ago who is also known as the Norwegian Farmer’s Son.
Norwegian Farmer's Son 