The Unseen Work That Keeps Winsor Going

Winsor had some invisible help staying healthy during the past few cold and flu seasons. Well, not visible to the human eye, anyway. Thanks to Winsor’s portable ultraviolet (UV) light sanitizer, the school’s facilities and janitorial teams—led by John Crompton, director of facilities and construction—have been able to maintain exceptionally clean and healthy spaces for Winsor’s students, teachers, staff, and families, even when case numbers spike.

“We watch the public health numbers,” Mr. Crompton says, and any time he, Chief Operating Officer Karen Geromini, and Nurse Sue Banerji-Cook notice an uptick, they’ll wheel out the 190-pound UV machine and get to work. “The bigger the space, the longer the cycle,” Mr. Crompton explains, saying a room like the Conway Room, for instance, requires a 27-minute cycle, during which they shut the machine into the space and close the blinds and doors. After the cycle’s complete, “when you go into the room, there is almost a faint burning smell” from the powerful light burning away the microbes from all surfaces and the air. “When that’s done, that room could not be any cleaner.”

The system, which Mr. Crompton first leased for Winsor during the COVID pandemic and three years later bought outright (“for a dollar”), is just one part of the school’s efforts to keep our facilities clean. He also describes “backpack blowers”—”they look like Ghostbusters”—used by his long-time janitorial supervisor, Murdoch “Doc” Cadogan, which spread a sanitation agent that clings to surfaces to help prevent disease transmission in high-touch areas. “Doc, he’s my angel,” Mr. Crompton says. “He works miracles for me when nobody else sees it.”

Mr. Crompton takes immense pride in the lengths to which his team goes to help keep the Winsor community healthy. “I watch the kids jump up and down with all kinds of energy,” he says, “and a little piece of that is that Ghostbusters machine and the UV machine.”

This is just one example of Mr. Crompton’s deep dedication to the quiet, often unseen labor that goes into supporting the Winsor student experience. That sense of purpose has infused his ever-changing daily work from when he first came to Winsor in May of 2013, tasked with building the Lubin-O’Donnell Center on a two-year contract. Thirteen years later, Mr. Crompton is looking ahead to retirement from Winsor in June. “I didn’t intend to stay,” he says, “but I stayed and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.”

What convinced him to stick with a job for more than a decade after the original task was finished? That’s easy. “Winsor students are amazing,” he says. “I’ve always had my daughter as a barometer. I see my daughter in every one of those students, everyone. Now I have a granddaughter. Izzy is four. I see Izzy in every one of those students. They didn’t get the memo that says ‘you can’t do this.’”

Add to this his colleagues: “The facilities team has been nothing short of amazing…I also have the janitorial and the security [teams], which are contracted out. But they, too, have been amazing,” he says. “There are things that are done when nobody sees. They’re typically things that are done by my janitorial team. They’re done by my second and third shift security offices… It’s these folks that are there when the building is really quiet—they’re the heroes. It’s not me. I just work with them.”

Mr. Crompton’s time at Winsor has been defined by a commitment to these largely invisible acts of service: “I look at the next generation and I say, how can I help? And for me to be able to fix a toilet, fix a light, fix an air conditioning unit—for me to be able to eliminate the distractions so the amazing teachers that we have can go out and do what they do, and so these students can go out and make a real impact—to me, that’s everything.”

“If I could be there for a period of time and in my small part of the world,” he reflects, “to be able to do something that enabled this amazing program to go on, to grow, to get better, then that, to me, was a home run.”