THAT comment.

The PAASCU team was here last week or two weeks ago. They had good reviews on the academic aspect of our school, but their complaint or negative comment was…guess what? The cleanliness of the campus. Not exactly what I expected.
Oh come on. Perhaps we’ve focused too much on how to impress the evaluators with recitations and participations that we disregarded the campus cleanliness. It’s quite a humiliating drawback. That possible? Yes. The prominent school was high on the quality education, but the candy wrappers, papers, plastics, and other rubbish littered the supposed-to-be institution of learning everybody looked up to. After all, cleanliness and tidiness does affect our learning concentration, doesn’t it?
And so we ask ourselves this question: Who are to be blamed? The janitors? The school has a couple of janitors. Are they doing their jobs? Maybe. The campus may be wide for them, but they can manage cleaning it, couldn’t they? I believe they could.
Here’s the big BUT.
BUT, if they do clean the campus as hard as they can, the campus could still get dirty if other people KEEP ON littering and making the campus filthy. People keep on polluting; janitors keep on cleaning. The cycle could go on repetitively in a day, in many unnoticed corners of the campus, of the buildings, of the classrooms. Who are these people?
We, the ones teaching and learning in this institution, benefiting from whatever we get from the school, are those people littering, throwing trash just about anywhere our hands can reach—a stone’s throw away; and making other places just not fit for a hygienic feel.
Again, what we can do is properly displace papers, tissues, bubble gum wrapped in paper at least, bottles, cans—meaning, displace them at the proper places, say, the trash bins; and displace them in the proper manner—that is, making sure they’re thrown into those trash cans (like what I said in my previous blog); the janitors clean anything else needing cleaning that we cannot do—comfort rooms, falling leaves, and others. Our trash is our responsibility. Our campus’ cleanliness is everybody’s responsibility and benefit. Shouldn’t we know that? We’ve been taught those since elementary, maybe even earlier.
The PAASCU team was right about it. We can at least bring back the good review on the environmental awareness of the campus—that is, proper trash disposal and other things that contribute to the campus sanitation—next time they visit. Will we just shrug and ignore what the PAASCU team complained of? Think again.