From graduation and Opening Mass in Marshall Stadium to a lunchroom filled with hungry students, nearly every aspect of Trinity involves the Operations crew.   

The clean classrooms, hallways and bathrooms seen every morning don’t happen by accident. It starts with hours of work every afternoon. 

Director of Operations Mr. Bill Hogg and his seven-man crew are responsible for a large array of duties designed to keep the school in pristine condition. They maintain numerous buildings around campus.

“Each crew person has an area they’re responsible for,” Hogg said.

The crew, of course, has day-to-day responsibilities during the school year — taking care of trash and recycling, cleaning hallways, maintaining classrooms, replacing damaged objects.

The grounds also have to be maintained. Hogg said, “They all have their own little plot of ground they’re supposed to take care of.”

The crew also spends a great deal of time setting up and taking down whatever is needed for events throughout the year. 

During the summer, however, things are different. The smaller duties still need to be kept up with, but bigger projects are undertaken to improve Trinity’s campus.

Just this past summer, a greenhouse was installed on school grounds. A new air ventilation system for the school was also recently installed.

To get Trinity ready for August, rotating areas of the school are also painted every summer, new desks are put into place, classrooms are waxed, and new furniture is placed to keep Trinity a state-of-the-art campus.

“There are a lot of little things like that that we do behind the scenes people don’t realize,” Hogg said.

Normally, the crew can complete their responsibilities each day without much difficulty. The pandemic, however, disrupted this flow.

New precautions and regulations were put in place. The never-ending list of tasks added sanitizing the school and maintaining school protocols.

They crew took their jobs one day at a time, always prioritizing safety, said Hogg. “We needed to clean doorknobs; we needed to clean handrails,” he said.

All of the crew members were vaccinated, but they still worked separately to maintain social distancing, and Hogg said, “That’s the way it remained for a while.”

This disruption posed a shift in what they were able to do each day, but the crew continued the new routine “from the first day of school to the last,” said Chad Baldwin, the lead supervisor of the Operations crew under Hogg and the manager of the work-study program.

The Operations crew is assisted by students through a work-study program, described as “a great first-time job,” according to Trinity Director of Admissions Mr. James Torra.

By participating in the program, students work 80 hours in total over the course of six weeks and are able earn money for their tuition.

The program is a long-standing aid to both Trinity and its students, according to Torra.  He said, “Dads, grandparents — they remember doing things like that.”

Some 200 students go through the program each year, with some who participate every year. Work-study prepares students for a real job, showing them responsibility, how to be on time for work, how to be dependable, and how to be a part of a crew, Torra said.

The members of the work-study crew form a bond with the Operations crew — knowing they have had a part in taking care of the campus.

Hogg summed up his crew’s responsibilities: “Everything at Trinity involves us.”

Gallery • 6 Photos

photo by Leo McAllister

Trinity's work-study program enables students to earn money toward tuition and learn valuable first-job skills.