When I was growing up we always called the man (and it was always a man) who worked maintenance in the school the janitor. It wasn't seen as a very dignified job, but most janitors were considered part of our school "family" and befriended by the students as well. Except for one guy, in a two-year (5th and 6th grade) school we were bussed to, who was also given the job of maintaining discipline in the lunchroom and ran it like a boot camp, barking orders with the intensity and wild eye of a Drill Instructor...Mr. Branch, I'll never forget him. Nobody liked him much, mostly out of fear (till after a while, when you figured out his bark was worse than his bite and that he was actually a nice guy)...but we all respected him, and he certainly kept an orderly lunchroom!
But as the years went by, it became more appropriate to use the the term custodian or custodial engineer...now, it seems, we've settled on custodian.
