When students, faculty and staff return after spring break, the newest round of layoffs will have taken place and the effects may be substantial.

In an article titled “BSWs undergo trial system to cope with layoffs” in Tuesday’s edition of The Daily Eastern News, Mark Hudson, the director of housing and dining, said the number of building service workers on campus after the layoffs will be roughly 75, down from the 104 at the beginning of the year.

The Eastern community will be affected in many different ways.
Hudson said bathroom, hallway, entranceway and classroom cleanliness are the priorities, and that means tending to them as often as possible.

Hudson also said there were no dining or residence hall cuts, because those positions are paid for with room and board fees.

But still, students may find the bathroom trashcans overflowing or the soap dispensers and paper towels running low in the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union, and professors may find their classroom floors littered with trash left behind by students.

During the current trial period, Hudson said there will be five teams of three BSWs who are assigned to a particular set of buildings.

This is a very small number of workers who already do so much for our campus.

We should all take the precautions to keep our school as clean as possible. BSWs aren’t always going to be around to pick up after us.

Don’t pile paper towels and to-go containers in the bathroom trashcan that is already overflowing and may not be changed for another day.

Take your empty water bottle with you when you leave class and toss it in the recycling bin outside the classroom door.

Clean up after yourself when you eat in the Bridge Lounge and you make a mess or spill a drink.

Throw away your candy wrappers after a basketball game in Lantz Arena.

We are all adults, and it is not hard to pick up after ourselves.

The trial system has included recently moving the trashcans from academic building classrooms into the hallways to make the cleanup efforts quicker and more effective.

While this may be a small inconvenience to us, think about how it will help keep the environment cleaner in the long run.

In a column titled “Students can help relieve budget stress,” in Tuesday’s edition of The News, Shelby Niehaus said that students should be more responsible for their own messes, and that will help take some of the stress off of the overworked BSWs.

These BSWs are overworked. They are working for hours every day to keep this campus clean, and now, nearly 30 of them are being laid off next week.

We, as a campus community, should do everything we can to help make their jobs easier.

The daily editorial is the majority opinion of the editorial board of The Daily Eastern News