1
“The Sanctuary of School”
LYNDA BARRY
I was 7 years old the first time I snuck out of the house in the
dark. It was
winter and my parents had been fighting all night. They were
short on
money and long on relatives who kept “temporarily” moving
into our house
because they had nowhere else to go.
My brother and I were used to giving up our bedroom. We slept
on the
couch, something we actually liked because it put us that much
closer to the
light of our lives, our television.
At night when everyone was asleep, we lay on our pillows
watching it
with the sound off. We watched Steve Allen’s mouth moving.
We watched
Johnny Carson’s mouth moving. We watched movies filled with
gangsters
shooting machine guns into packed rooms, dying soldiers
hurling a last
grenade and beautiful women crying at windows. Then the sign-
off finally
came and we tried to sleep.

The morning I snuck out, I woke up filled with a panic about
needing to
get to school. The sun wasn’t quite up yet but my anxiety was
so fierce that
I just got dressed, walked quietly across the kitchen and let
myself out the
back door.
It was quiet outside. Stars were still out. Nothing moved and no
one was
in the street. It was as if someone had turned the sound off on
the world.
I walked the alley, breaking thin ice over the puddles with my
shoes. I
didn’t know why I was walking to school in the dark. I didn’t
think about it.
All I knew was a feeling of panic, like the panic that strikes
kids when they
realize they are lost.
That feeling eased the moment I turned the corner and saw the
dark outline
of my school at the top of the hill. My school was made up of
about 15
nondescript portable classrooms set down on a fenced concrete
lot in a rundown
Seattle neighborhood, but it had the most beautiful view of the
Cascade
Mountains. You could see them from anywhere on the playfield
and
you could see them from the windows of my classroom—Room
2.

I walked over to the monkey bars and hooked my arms around
the cold
metal. I stood for a long time just looking across Rainier
Valley. The sky was
beginning to whiten and I could hear a few birds.
In a perfect world my absence at home would not have gone
unnoticed. I
would have had two parents in a panic to locate me, instead of
two parents
in a panic to locate an answer to the hard question of survival
during a deep
2
financial and emotional crisis.
But in an overcrowded and unhappy home, it’s incredibly easy
for any
child to slip away. The high levels of frustration, depression
and anger in my
house made my brother and me invisible. We were children with
the sound
turned off. And for us, as for the steadily increasing number of
neglected
children in this country, the only place where we could count on
being noticed
was at school.
“Hey there, young lady. Did you forget to go home last night?”
It was Mr.
Gunderson, our janitor, whom we all loved. He was nice and he

was funny
and he was old with white hair, thick glasses and an
unbelievable number
of keys. I could hear them jingling as he walked across the
playfield. I felt
incredibly happy to see him.
He let me push his wheeled garbage can between the different
portables
as he unlocked each room. He let me turn on the lights and raise
the
window shades and I saw my school slowly come to life. I saw
Mrs. Holman,
our school secretary, walk into the office without her orange
lipstick on yet.
She waved.
I saw the fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Cunningham, walking under
the
breezeway eating a hard roll. He waved.
And I saw my teacher, Mrs. Claire LeSane, walking toward us
in a red
coat and calling my name in a very happy and surprised way,
and suddenly
my throat got tight and my eyes stung and I ran toward her
crying. It was
something that surprised us both.
It’s only thinking about it now, 28 years later, that I realize I
was crying
from relief. I was with my teacher, and in a while I was going to
sit at my
desk, with my crayons and pencils and books and classmates all
around me,
and for the next six hours I was going to enjoy a thoroughly

secure, warm
and stable world. It was a world I absolutely relied on. Without
it, I don’t
know where I would have gone that morning.
Mrs. LeSane asked me what was wrong and when I said
“Nothing,” she
seemingly left it at that. But she asked me if I would carry her
purse for her,
an honor above all honors, and she asked if I wanted to come
into Room 2
early and paint.
She believed in the natural healing power of painting and
drawing for troubled
children. In the back of her room there was always a drawing
table and
an easel with plenty of supplies, and sometimes during the day
she would
come up to you for what seemed like no good reason and quietly
ask if you
wanted to go to the back table and “make some pictures for Mrs.
LeSane.” We
all had a chance at it—to sit apart from the class for a while to
paint, draw
3
and silently work out impossible problems on 11×17 sheets of
newsprint.
Drawing came to mean everything to me. At the back table in

Room 2,
I learned to build myself a life preserver that I could carry into
my home.
We all know that a good education system saves lives, but the
people of
this country are still told that cutting the budget for public
schools is necessary,
that poor salaries for teachers are all we can manage and that
art,
music and all creative activities must be the first to go when
times are lean.
Before- and after-school programs are cut and we are told that
public schools
are not made for baby-sitting children. If parents are neglectful
temporarily
or permanently, for whatever reason, it’s certainly sad, but their
unlucky
children must fend for themselves. Or slip through the cracks.
Or wander in
a dark night alone.
We are told in a thousand ways that not only are public schools
not
important, but that the children who attend them, the children
who need
them most, are not important either. We leave them to learn
from the blind
eye of a television, or to the mercy of “a thousand points of
light”1 that can
be as far away as stars.
I was lucky. I had Mrs. LeSane. I had Mr. Gunderson. I had an
abundance
of art supplies. And I had a particular brand of neglect in my

home that allowed
me to slip away and get to them. But what about the rest of the
kids
who weren’t as lucky? What happened to them?
By the time the bell rang that morning I had finished my
drawing and
Mrs. LeSane pinned it up on the special bulletin board she
reserved for drawings
from the back table. It was the same picture I always drew—a
sun in the
corner of a blue sky over a nice house with flowers all around
it.
Mrs. LeSane asked us to please stand, face the flag, place our
right hands
over our hearts and say the Pledge of Allegiance. Children
across the country
do it faithfully. I wonder now when the country will face its
children and
say a pledge right back.
Thinking About The Text
3. Barry uses the expression “the sound off” or “the sound
turned off” three
times in the essay (3, 5, 10). In which instances is it meant
literally and in which
figuratively? How does the repetition of this language help
make the point of
her narrative?
4. Barry concludes her essay with a call for the United States
and its education
system to make a “pledge” to children (24). Although her
proposals are not
spelled out, what can you infer about what Barry is asking the

schools to do?
Provide examples from the text that indicate what she thinks is
important.
4
“Clean Sweep”
RYAN KOHL S
Forty thousand people are packed into the Rogers Centre to
watch the
Toronto Blue Jays. Right now, the stadium still belongs to the
players,
the fans and the vast, expensively-produced spectacle of
professional sports.
But at gate three, a group of about fifty congregates. Some
stand alone, or
pace and listen to music. Others sit on wooden benches nearby
and enjoy
a final cigarette. It’s 10:30 pm, and these grim-faced men and
women are
waiting for work to begin. Standing on the curb as the game
wraps up inside,
these are the cleaners.
They’ll work until dawn, gathering up some 15,000 pounds of
garbage,
scrubbing, rinsing, bending and lifting with painstaking
thoroughness.

By morning, the stadium will gleam and the cleaners will go
home to
sleep with the blinds pulled tight against the sun. Now, they try
to relax,
joking to keep the mood light. “Are you ready for more
torture?” one of them
asks.
Spread out across 12.7 acres, the Rogers Centre, once known as
the Sky-
Dome, is one of Toronto’s most recognizable landmarks. Every
year 3.5 mil-
lion people attend events at the mammoth complex. The big
crowds mean
big business—baseball’s Blue Jays, whose eighty-one home
games provide
the stadium’s main attraction, are worth an estimated $568
million. One
season produces 1.2 million pounds of garbage. Eventually,
someone must
clean it up. Enter the cleaners—exhausted, poorly paid and
largely anonymous.
Without them, the game can’t go on.
On a given night, anywhere from thirty to one hundred cleaners
scour the
stadium. Most of them work for Hallmark Housekeeping
Services, a Torontobased
janitorial agency that holds the cleaning contract at the Rogers
Centre.
These workers are experienced; Hallmark employees clean after
every
event. The other cleaners come from Labor Ready, a huge
company that supplies

temporary blue-collar workers across Canada and the United
States.
These employees book the Rogers Centre gig on a nightly basis
and typically
work a shorter shift. Both groups of workers are predominantly
immigrants
or down on their luck.
In the summer of 2012, I worked as a cleaner, on-and-off, for
three
months. I participated in roughly twenty-five cleaning shifts as
an em-
ployee of Labor Ready, joining the agency after struggling to
find journalism
work in the city.
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Most cleaners patrol the stadium with brooms and large
transparent
garbage bags; a handful of more seasoned employees take leaf
blowers. With
the motor slung across their backs and a long black nozzle
pumping out air,
they blow the garbage from two parallel seating sections into
one aisle. The
blowers weigh about 25 pounds. One worker described it as
being like “carrying
an obese baby around all night.”

Once enough garbage reaches the aisle, the sweepers climb to
the top
of their section and begin to slosh the mess downwards. In time,
the pile
turns into a cascading waterfall of miscellaneous trash. Beer-
soaked hot
dogs mix with ketchup-infused popcorn and the ubiquitous
shells of sunflower
seeds, which are maddeningly hard to persuade off the wet
concrete.The mixture
leaves behind a slick residue that makes the stairs treacherous.
Workers sometimes slip and hurt their backs. Some stadiums
have tried
to control the garbage, but at baseball stadiums, seeds cannot be
so easily
dispatched—they’re an iconic part of the game. “Getting rid of
[sunflower
seeds] would be like getting rid of beer and hot dogs,” says
Wayne Sills, the
director of facility services at the Rogers Centre.
The last stage of cleaning is accomplished with four thirty-
metre yellow
hoses, spraying highly pressurized water into the aisles, aimed
by workers
in rubber boots. The Rogers Centre is one of the few North
American
sports stadiums to get the pressure-wash treatment—visiting
teams have
been known to remark on the building’s uncanny cleanliness.
Around 2:30 am Rosario Coutinho scans the Centre with
binoculars. She’ll
spot a sweeper slacking off and radio the nighttime supervisor
to assess the
situation and get things moving. Coutinho then heads to another

location
where she can remain unseen and watch closely. “I’m the
ghost,” she tells
me one night.
Coutinho, now fifty-two, serves as the resident manager of the
cleanup
operation. She pulls her black hair back in a ponytail, wears
glasses, a
black fleece and black pants, a BlackBerry headset and a
crucifix on a chain.
Coutinho knows more about the cleaning process than anyone.
She’s been at
the Rogers Centre for nearly twenty-five years.
The workers are on to her tactics. Once, a group of Mexican
cleaners developed
a system of whistles to alert the others when she was watching.
Coutinho translated the calls and changed her moves
accordingly.
To become the binocular boss, Coutinho had to start from the
bottom.
In 1989, just a month after the SkyDome opened, she
immigrated to Canada
from Portugal. Her husband already lived here and told her
about the opening
of an amazing new stadium. Coutinho remembers being
unimpressed;
some stadiums in Europe hold 100,000 people. But the
retractable roof that
6

gave the building its name was, she was told, a sight to behold.
Before her arrival, Coutinho was prepared to work hard. “I
knew I would
be doing jobs that no one else wanted to do,” she recalls. “If
I’m cleaning
shit, who cares? I’m going to make it smell better.” Two months
after landing
in Toronto she was cleaning at the SkyDome. Her first
assignment was the
luxury boxes. One night she found a briefcase containing
$10,000 cash. She
returned it. The job meant everything and she couldn’t risk
losing it.
This atypical attitude caught management’s attention and within
a
year she was promoted to team leader. “Seventy percent of
people in the
cleaning business have no pride,” Coutinho says. “Earn what
you make,
that’s what counts.” By 1995, she was managing the entire
operation.
Few cleaners are as scrupulous as Coutinho. Many hate being
there—some
show up drunk, others get drunk in the stadium bathrooms on
left-behind
tallboys from the stands or their own flasks of hard liquor. Still
others find
their pay-off elsewhere: take Mark Stanton [not his real name].
It’s his third
season cleaning at the Rogers Centre and his favourite part of

the job is finding
money.
After the Jays’ home opener, sporting a leaf blower slung across
his
back, he guides sunflower shells, empty beer cans and half-
eaten hot dogs
across an aisle. Out of the corner of his eye he spots a wallet.
He flicks off the
blower, bends over and plucks it from a pile of trash. He can’t
get too excited;
he has to act calm: someone could be watching. He hunches
over, peers inside
and sees the cash. Quickly, with a practiced motion, he slides
$30 into
his pants. “Sometimes I go to work and I’m flat broke,” says
Stanton. “If I find
$30, there’s $30 in my pocket until pay day.” He will eventually
return the
wallet, a little lighter, to security.
Stanton is adept at working the stadium’s unofficial and
technically illegal
lost-and-found system to his advantage. At last year’s home
opener, he
scored five wallets with $30 or more and two half-packs of
smokes. When
he cleaned up after the 100th Grey Cup, he found $150, three
Grey Cup souvenir
glasses and three t-shirts. After Ultimate Fighting
Championship 129,
he found a judge’s scorecard and three bloody hand wraps. The
excitement
creates plenty of opportunities for fans to drop things. After
every event,

without fail, an array of valuables remains behind. For the
workers, this is
a perk, a way to make the job feel worthwhile. Some nights pay
off huge. At
UFC 100, one worker found and kept a wallet with $1,500.
That’s a month’s
wages. Other cleaners have found diamond rings, iPhones,
BlackBerries,
digital cameras, transit passes, sunglasses and umbrellas.
The treasure hunt is on everyone’s mind. Having a successful
night requires
skill and attention. You can’t just sweep or blow the garbage,
you have
7
to watch and listen. Over time, workers learn to hear the
difference between
a sliding beer tab and a coin. One worker uses his haul to pay
child support
for his three kids. He found $150 once and used it to buy his
son a stroller.
When the clock hits 3 am, the stadium falls silent, and the
workers break for
“lunch.” There’s a cheap hot dog stand on Front Street that’s
popular. Most of
the cleaners can afford a meal using the spare change they’ve
found during
their shift.

Only three-quarters of the workers return after the break. Labor
Ready
workers are generally only used for sweeping and bagging.
They’ll get paid
for four hours of work. As they disappear into the night, some
head to bed,
but others walk back to Labor Ready to collect their cheque and
secure the
next job. The company’s offices at 195 Church Street don’t
open until 5:30
am, so many nights they’ll wait in Dundas Square. If they time
it just right,
they’ll score a free breakfast from the Salvation Army truck that
passes by
Labor Ready every morning.
Thinking About Text:
1.) Ryan Kohls begins with a description of the ballpark’s
splendor and the cleaning
process that keeps it that way, but the focus soon shifts to the
cleaners themselves.
What is his purpose in this profile ? Point to examples in the
text to
support your answer.
3.) Kohls is clearly happy to no longer work as a stadium
cleaner. Despite having
moved on in his own career, what is his attitude toward his
former colleagues?
How does he portray them and their work? Point to examples in
the
text to support your response.