Joe Kern was a sophomore at Seneca High School when he started working here part-time. He went over his contracted hours. By his junior and senior years, the district was paying into his retirement fund. That was 1992. He graduated in 1994 and never left. He's been here 34 years — first as a student, now as the groundskeeper who maintains the fields, turf, mowers, and the parking lots that fill with snow at unpredictable hours.

"You never know," he said. "I woke up one morning at five and like, wow, I gotta get to school. It just started coming down. You want to get it gone before the kids get in here."

When Joe walked through Seneca's doors as a freshman, he'd come from grade school in Marseilles — a different atmosphere entirely. "Holy cow," he remembered. "It was just different. The teachers and everybody here were more eager to talk to you and willing to help you if you needed help." He's been maintaining those same doors ever since.

The people responsible for keeping this building running number about eight to nine in total — six afternoon custodians, two daytime custodians, and the three-person maintenance crew: Joe, Bob Laycoax, and their director, Jim Harsted.

Bob is the maintenance technician and a licensed electrician. He came from Oak Forest, lives in Monee, and takes the back roads each day. He's been here 15 years. His title is electrician, but he does far more plumbing than electrical work. "I basically work on everything that is broken — from floor to ceiling, door locks, keys, you name it." Over the past four years, he also converted the entire building to LED lighting — roughly 5,000 fixtures- and worked alongside his regular duties whenever there was time, with help from a retired electrician and a student named Kenneth Sangston. Kenneth and his brother Luke, are now both licensed IBEW electricians. Bob still talks to Luke every day. "I'm still close to the Sangston boys," he said.

Bob also typically has a student helper assigned to him during the school year. It's mentorship by doing — the same trade knowledge he brings to the building, passed along informally to whoever's working beside him.

Jim Harsted ran a custom home construction company with his brother-in-law before coming to Seneca four years ago. He was the climber — roofs, scaffolding — until age made him practical about it. "I got out before I had a problem." Now he pushes a button on a scissor lift. Before he arrived, he'd always assumed Seneca was the "upper people" of LaSalle County. When he got here, "They're regular people. They still have old boilers and old heating and air problems." He's found the greeting culture the hardest adjustment — coming from years of early-morning work with one partner in silence, suddenly everyone is saying good morning. "It took me a long time to get used to saying good morning to everybody."

Jim's responsibilities include something he calls "a little wrinkle in the system": the West Campus. A separate, older building a few blocks away that houses a preschool and gets seven to ten community rentals a week — baseball teams, birthday parties, donkey basketball, blood draws, and election polling. The building is aging and difficult to maintain, but closing it is not an option. The first class that graduated from the current main building (class of 1980) is still living. Kathy, one of the district's custodians, was in that graduating class. "It's like trying to kill a mascot," I said. Jim agreed immediately.

Every spring break, the crew runs $70,000-$80,000 worth of tuck pointing through the building — preventive work to extend the life of the structure. This summer, the main office and guidance office will get a full renovation. The philosophy is consistent: pay now or pay significantly more later. That's a responsible and successful financial strategy.

Stacy Gould manages the math behind all of it. Her title is Chief School Business Official — a specific endorsement required by state law — and she's been here five years. She came from public accounting and then a financial analyst role at a firm in Ottawa. Ottawa High School is where she went to school; she grew up competing against Seneca in sports. "We always knew Seneca." Coming here, she expected something different. What she found was a community with genuine pride and a staff that actually enjoys being there.

Her job is figuring out how to be fiscally responsible to taxpayers while funding what Seneca wants to build. On the list: science labs from the original 1978 building that need full modernization, and a media center transformation into a collaborative hub with podcast space. Three to five years out, budget willing. Dan Stecken has a planning board.

The farm is part of it too — 100-plus acres of tillable ground a few miles out of town, with buildings and a cross-country course. The ag program runs it. Students bale straw in summer and sell it in winter. Joe goes out there regularly.

I told them I’ve been in hundreds of school buildings through my work, and that I could tell within minutes of arriving whether the maintenance team was on it. "Your team is on it," I said.

They accepted the compliment the way people do when they've just been seen. Seneca has incredible resources for a school of any size, and those resources are impeccably maintained. It has this crew to thank. That’s the Seneca Way.