On a sunny afternoon in late May — as students lounged on the turf field and enjoyed lunch outside — Maintenance Assistant Foreman Mike McGlauflin glided across the Quad atop a large green lawnmower, clad in a brown jacket and protective headphones.
“Riding the John Deere equipment, whether it’s the mower or the big tractor, I find that pretty fun,” he said. As his long career at Lakeside comes to an end, the ride would be one of his last at the school, but his impact on the campus and community will endure.
Mr. McGlauflin started at Lakeside on May 10, 1984 after his neighbor, who worked at Lakeside, told him about the job. Prior to Lakeside, he held a variety of seasonal jobs, including webbing crab pots, cutting glass for windows, and working on a fish tender on a boat that traveled from Ballard to Alaska. “[My neighbor] decided he was going to move on from Lakeside and asked me if I wanted to work at a school. And I said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with a school!’” Having not enjoyed school as a kid, Mr. McGlauflin was hesitant but, at the time, he was in between jobs. “So I gave [Lakeside] a shot — and that was 42 years ago.”
Ever since, Mr. McGlauflin has had a storied career at Lakeside. Along with the rest of the maintenance crew, which includes his younger brother Charlie, he has worked year-round — including through school breaks and snow days — to keep Lakeside’s campus beautiful and functioning. A skilled welder, glass cutter, and plumber, he lived in one of Lakeside’s rental houses for about a decade, where he raised two sons. A former “diehard Sonics fan,” he also played basketball at Lakeside twice a week: Wednesdays with students (including Sonics star Lenny Wilkens’ son) and Sundays with Lakeside alums (including T.J. Vassar).
Mr. McGlauflin said he enjoyed the variety of his job. Over the years, his work has included everything from groundswork (mowing, raking, edging, etc.) to monitoring the boilers that once heated Lakeside’s campus to installing the Quad’s irrigation system. He’s even caught students sneaking around in the Bliss bell tower. His favorite work, however, is plumbing — a skill he learned entirely at Lakeside.
“It was really nice learning the skills that I picked up from here,” he said, recalling a humorous conversation he had with previous Head of School Bernie Noe. “One day, he said to me … ‘Wow, you sure know a lot.’ And I said, ‘Well, Bernie, I hate to tell you this, but I picked all these things up working at Lakeside, making my mistakes here, so now when I go home I don’t have to worry about making a mistake…’”
In his 42 years at Lakeside, Mr. McGlauflin has witnessed many changes, but the one that stands out to him the most is Lakeside’s increased diversity. “When I first started working here, it was nothing but white people up on the stage graduating,” he said, adding that, back in the ‘80s, the few students of color tended to stick together in groups. “You walk around right now and everybody knows everybody,” he said. In the 1990s, he also remembers wondering how parents who weren’t ultra-wealthy or privileged could get their kids into Lakeside. Now, he said, the school has “opened [its] doors up really wide and let in such a diverse group of people.” Mr. McGlauflin finds it especially wonderful that his maintenance colleague’s daughter is attending Lakeside.
Mr. McGlauflin has a passion for helping others. Early in his career, he was mowing at the Middle School when he noticed an elderly man walking around his house, trying to get in. Mr. McGlauflin approached, and the man explained that his wife had fallen in the bathroom, but the man was unable to help her because his house was locked. Mr. McGlauflin sprang into action, crawling through the couple’s bathroom window to unlock their door. He remembers how meaningful it was when, about a week later, Lakeside’s Head of School Dan Ayrault came up to shake his hand and thank him for helping the neighbor. Ultimately, he said, “I like helping people and Lakeside School, over the years, [has] allowed me to help people in various ways.”
As he departs Lakeside, Mr. McGlauflin said what he’ll miss most is the food, meeting people from different places, and working with his colleagues. In an email to Tatler, Maintenance Foreman Jesse Ruhoff shared, “Mike truly cares about Lakeside [and] he wants it to look [its] best at all times. He likes the students and staff [and] he wants them to have a great experience here, he feels they should all enjoy, love, and respect the campus, community, and facilities, taking care of them just like he would.”
“I really can’t speak more highly of a person,” Maintenance staff member Bradley Layfield wrote. “Mike has so much integrity he could sell it and still have plenty left over. He has been an amazing teacher… I have learned so much from him from plumbing to glass cutting to how to teach better. It’s hard to wrap your mind around it honestly … If it were up to me he would have a statue in the quad. I don’t think the school could possibly replace him. I just hope we can keep it up to his standards.”
When he’s not working, Mr. McGlauflin loves spending time outdoors. He enjoys going on rafting trips with his younger son, downhill skiing, gardening, and fishing. (In an email to Tatler, Director of Facilities Dan Dawkins shared that Mr. McGlauflin “has incredible skill fishing the rivers for salmon-and is generous sharing his catches.”) After retiring, Mr. McGlauflin’s goal is to ski a 100-day season. He also hopes to fix up his log cabin near Steven’s Pass and his Snohomish farmhouse, both of which are around a century old.
“It’s nice having all the knowledge that Lakeside has given me, or that I’ve earned over the years here, to keep working on things,” he said. “I’ll still be working, but I’ll be working for myself.”
