Steve, Buildings and Grounds, Sidwell Friends School

               I met Steve in his office in the Sidwell Security Office. Steve, or Mr. Sawyer, was seated behind a cluttered desk. He was apprehensive about being interviewed, saying he didn't know how qulified he was to give advice, but once he got going he had quite a lot to say. He smiled often, chuckled at his own jokes, and made use of his office chair to turn himself to different angles as he spoke.

Steve in front of the green Middle School building

             “I’m the plant manager here, which means I’m in charge of all the buildings, all the grounds, anything to do with the facilities of the campus. When I first started I came straight out of college and I was in charge of just the grounds. That was pretty straight forward, you know what you’re getting into. I did that for a number of years.  I also coached boys JV soccer, boys varsity, girls varsity. We won a banner. We’ve done pretty well. I don’t have an engineering background and a lot of what has to happen with the buildings is kind of behind the scenes and making sure the HVAC systems are working and keeping people warm and keeping people cool at different times.

            Starting in I guess 2003, we embarked on this whole green adventure, starting with Zartman House. Few people know we actually started with Zartman House, changing it over into a geothermal system there, and that was quite a ride. The job’s stayed interesting, I’ve learned an awful lot here and so I think that’s why I’ve been able to stay so long and not just (he snores) get bored.

         The school has changed quite a bit. I’d say when I first came we did things small scale. The school’s always been in good shape, always been a great place for students to learn, but I’d say we weren’t taking a grand view of what we’re doing here, and I think that has changed. I think, I’m not trying to be boastful here, but we see ourselves as a leader. And we have a ways to go, but we’re really doing a lot here that’s cutting edge, and I think we’re up front on a lot of these curves, and that was not always the case. We used to be trailing some of those curves, and that’s been a really dramatic change, to be really out front, to kind of push the envelope… and I’d say sometimes the envelope has kind of pushed back.

            I didn’t realize the scope of what we were starting there and how transformative that experience [with the middle school] would be. The building still runs, it still has air pumps, it still has chillers, it has the kind of things that any building has, but the integration of all that stuff though the computers and through the complexity and the number of things that are intertwined to make that building run, that caught me off guard. I thought ‘oh yeah, it’s a couple more things, we can probably handle that.’ No. We need help with that.  And in fact, we’re still sorting some things out with that, six years later. So that was a real eye-opener, for me.

        But I think also, -that was sort of a negative side of it- but I think on the positive side of it, I could see how transforming that building from really quite a horrible building –really poor lighting, really poor ventilation and that kind of thing- and how that building would change us to change all the little things. I think the school as a whole will no longer tolerate things like using paints with bad VOCs. I didn’t anticipate that whole tidal wave of change going through, that caught me off guard. And in a good way. I like being on that wave, I like surfing that wave, but I didn’t know that was coming.

          It’s kind of a yin-yang thing: on a daily basis I’m involved with all the problems like ‘gosh, how come we can’t get this fixed, this temperature, that’s so complicated,’ and on the other side, I get to have people come though, and I get to show them the building, all of our buildings and they say ‘oh! This stuff’s great, you know, what you’re doing here is amazing!’ so I get to see some of the positive sides. I live where the problems are but I get to see the positives and I- that’s a really nice positive. So yes, there’s pride in the building, pride in what the school’s doing.

            And now we have the Upper School building that was renovated back in 1997, and now I’m thinking ‘gosh, what can we do to improve this building?’ We’re never really gonna have a chance to take that building down and renovate it because we have no place to put 480 kids- cause it would take a year, year and a half to renovate it- so we’re gonna be doing small bites of renovation. We have a path now, I think we know what we wanna get done. It is a different approach, but when you start, you still have to know where you’re going to end up. If it’s gonna be a five, six, seven year thing where you’re doing a month, two months of work, it’s easy to forget where you’re going.
 
          I never though that I’d be so sucked up in this whole green thing. I think the lesson probably is: you have no idea where you’re gonna end up and what you’re gonna end up doing and what’s gonna kinda grab ahold of you at some point and just be your motivator and your driver. You can’t anticipate it. All you can do it be willing to let new stuff come at you, and go with it. Because there’s gonna be something out there that’s gonna say ‘that’s what I wanna do.’ And it’s not gonna happen the day you declare your major, it’s not gonna happen the day you graduate, it’s gonna happen some quiet moment you have no idea how- ‘where’d that come from?’ – all of a sudden ‘that’s what I really wanna spend my time doing.’

    
         Today I saw some people who were just coming back for their thirtieth reunion, students like yourselves who had just graduated the year I arrived, and to see what some of them are doing. You know, Anne Applebaum who’s with the Washington Post and Eric Adler who’s doing the SEED school… people are doing great things and you guys are going to be doing great things thirty years from now too.

            When I was in grounds I’d go out, I’d do the work, I’d mulch a bed, I’d trim the bushes, and at the end of the day I’d look behind me and I’d go ‘well that looks much better than it did eight hours ago.’ And I’d get some satisfaction from that. But I wonder to myself ‘How do teachers do this?’ You know, they spend their day trying to import knowledge into students’ heads. Do they get to turn around at the end of the day and say ‘I made a difference here?’ Probably not as evident as what I did. But thirty years later, they’ve done incredible stuff. And so I hope they find their satisfaction that way. For me it’s a little simpler, a little more tangible, but what they’re doing is great. I think people should spend more effort on supporting high school, secondary school education. Everybody says ‘ohh, college,’ but that’s not where you get the love of learning. You get the love of learning in high school. And that’s why we can’t have these people who are just dropping out of high school, that’s just a terrible thing and this whole climate of not supporting education in the country now, that’s a terrible thing. But I’m just rambling now. But I think that’s where we need to keep putting effort in- putting effort into educating people so they’re inspired to do great things.”

"I think the lesson probably is: you never know where you're going to end up or what you're going to end up doing."