Rushing up to the gym on September 18th, Mrs.Sharon Hoagland worked to keep the torrential downpour of rain out of Triton High School. She continues to put in all her effort even as she wraps up her last month at Triton.

Hoagland has been at Triton for 25 years. She has seen power outages, staph infection, blizzards, ice hockey in the parking lots, and many other challenges. She knows how to overcome them all.  In the month of October Hoagland will be retiring. She will be moving on to do many adventurous things.

“ I’ll take the winter off and do nothing. I have many projects… (we have a ) cruise planned in March… visit grandkids and great grandkids, I haven’t seen them in a year. In the future I may pick up a part time job. I might want to do something at a hospital.”

It is possible that students think that the school is never clean. It can be easier to complain about things when there isn’t a face or a name to it. However there is a staff working tirelessly to keep it clean and recent cuts to staff it can be hard. In a survey, 1 out of 10 people in the school knew Sharon Hoagland by name. Most of the students knew her as the nice lady who always smiles and waves at them in the hallway, and Hoagland helps with heartbreaking coffee drops first thing in the morning.   

Hoagland started her career in Newburyport.

“I cleaned a business in Newburyport, a private business. It was like an old house and had several floors, and I did that for several years.” After that she was brought in by another cleaning team to work at Triton.

“There was another cleaning company who brought me on (to work at Triton) and then Triton brought me on (as a hired employee), and I worked the day shift.”

But after 25 great years she is ready to move on.

As a result of losing Hoagland, Triton will be one person short on the day shift. So the school has decided to bring one of our night shift custodians onto the day shift. This worker is Ryan Collins. He has worked at Triton for eight years. Collins has gotten to work with Hoagland during vacation shifts. He says when Hoagland is gone he will miss her humor. He has been primarily on the night shift the whole time he has worked here. He says he is a night owl and that was the best part of the shift.

When asked what he is looking forward to in regards to the day shift he said  “ To be with my family. I only get to see my wife Sundays and monday Mornings.”   

Along with losing Hoagland, work hours were also be cut for the custodial staff, due to budget cuts. In a meeting with Mr.Walsh he said that this would be a very big challenge.

“It’s increasing their workload tremendously.” said Mr.Walsh. “Mr.(Steven)Orme And Mrs.Hoagland have been down doing the lunch duty where they hadn’t before and it ties up Mr.(Steven)Orme, he’s the head custodian of the building, and if a situation comes up, he has to prioritize its has in my opinion created an extra burden and more responsibility for him….”

We already have our custodians working tirelessly to keep the school in order. Now their attention will be split in a million different ways.

“Last Tuesday,” said Walsh, “with the downpour we were being inundated with water coming through the windows, coming up through the floor drains, and [custodial staff] still has to deal with that and with lunch it puts a lot of pressure on [custodial staff].”

Those big storms are rough to handle fully staffed, but we won’t have that anymore. A big question is “What’s going to happen with the big snow storms during the winter?”

Mr.Walsh said ”Me and the superintendent monitor the weather and we want to make sure if there is a weather event… at noon time and we’re still in school and the students and staff have to get out… we have to take action and try and make it safe and make sure that people can get out of the parking lots and walkways and sometimes that’s tricky so you have to be available for that.”

Hoagland has seen a lot of those storms in her 25 years, and Collins will see a lot more of them.

Hoagland will be missed by all staff and students. “The interaction of the kids and the staff.” She said. “Gonna miss the people…. I just love doing my job. “