BY KENNA HURTUK ’23
Outside the door of each housekeeping closet is a whiteboard on which students write welcoming, encouraging and grateful messages to acknowledge Mount Holyoke housekeepers. Many students only see them in passing and may not have a complete sense of their lives and how our behaviors affect them. For one housekeeper, Rhonda Saletnik, her life involves much more than cleaning up after students.
“I feel like I’m the mama bear of the dorm,” she said, “and you guys are my peeps. I come and kind of, you know, clean the place like I would home. But I don’t expect my kids to make a mess and leave it.”
Saletnik began working at Mount Holyoke just eight months ago, in February. She said that the 2019 school year has been “a really good year” for her as an employee.
“Mount Holyoke, I feel, is a really good place to work,” she said. “I think they care about their employees.”
Photo by Mimi Huckins ’21
She added that the transition has been “great” and involves work in the summertime, where housekeeping employees bond together as they prepare for students’ arrival.
Saletnik works in Pearsons Hall Monday through Friday from 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
“I clean everything — the bathrooms, the common areas, the floors, the laundry room… just make sure the whole building is clean and looks nice,” she said.
She is often unnoticed in her work; she said that she sees students only when they pass by or when she has a problem to present, such as students leaving items in the hallway.
However, she believes that the students in her residential hall are doing a “really good” job of taking care of their spaces and being respectful.
She said that, when she witnesses incidents such as student breaches in protocol for common areas, “that can be kind of annoying, but you just kind of take it with a grain of salt.”
Outside of working at Mount Holyoke, Saletnik still has a busy life.
“I’m a mom and a wife,” Saletnik said. “I take care of my husband and my kids. I try to get family time in — I have a second job as well ... I’m a caregiver, so I work part-time taking care of clients I’ve been with for a very long time.”
Saletnik has always cared for others. In fact, prior to working as a housekeeper, she was in the medical field.
“This is actually a career change for me,” she said. “I wanted better benefits … I just happened to go online and saw the housekeeping position and was like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna go for it.’”
She has enjoyed the change in pace; in the medical field, she said, she was tasked with immensely stressful work.
“I like to clean,” she said. “Even in the medical field, when I had a break there, I’d be cleaning, and everybody would be like, ‘What are you doing? We have maids that come in.’ But I always kept busy.” She describes her current work as methodical and relaxing.
“I know it sounds kind of weird,” she said. “People will be like, ‘You left the medical field for cleaning?’ But it just relaxes me. I don’t know why.”
So what can students do to keep her work relaxing instead of frustrating? The answer is simple: “Just pick up after themselves,” Saletnik said.
“I like helping people,” Saletnik said. “It makes me happy.” From the career paths she’s chosen, this philosophy is exceedingly evident.
“I feel students are here and they’re studying and they’re trying to build their career, so for me, coming in to give them a clean and warm place to live makes me happy,” she said.