Killeen resident, Jessica Caldwell, 37, knows a thing or two about working literally around the clock. She knows about overnight shifts, 40-plus hour work weeks where the start of her day is at 8 p.m., lunch is at midnight, and her drive home at 6 a.m. is on the other side of the highway from people beginning their workday.
On any given day, sometimes seven days a week, she wrestles the hours of her day into submission simultaneously prioritizing, doing, and completing one goal after another. Sometimes, it’s work. Sometimes it’s family. Sometimes, it is studying for the alternative certification exam. Sometimes, she says, it is the unexpected. Sometimes, it’s everything all the time every day.
But it is worth it, she says. It is more than worth it. And that nocturnal work schedule from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. has only been the half of it. During that same time, the long nights and longer days, Caldwell decided to also become a college student with one goal: She wants to be a teacher.
Just as her kids were pulling a pillow over their heads for the second time, finally putting both feet to the floor and shuffling into a shower, and her friends and neighbors were sipping a second cup of coffee, Caldwell, one of the A&M-Central Texas custodians had already tackled the 31 restrooms, 40+ classrooms, a dozen labs, and each and every one of the 349 offices and workspaces in all three of the A&M-Central Texas buildings.
By the time her kids were off to school, when she might have been getting some much-needed sleep, she was in school, too – wide awake in the classrooms at Central Texas College, hammering away at the coursework necessary to transfer to A&M-Central Texas for her teaching degree.
From 2013 to 2018 – without pause or fail – she worked the overnight shift at the university and, in the daylight hours, she attended mostly full-time, tackling an aggressive slate of courses including biology, speech, English Composition I and II, macroeconomics, college algebra, world geography, history and government I and II and a plethora of electives until her efforts tallied an impressive 90-hour credit total and a hard-earned B- grade point average – or, put another way, more than enough to have earned one and a half associate degrees.
The fact that she was a daytime scholar and overnight custodian never gave her a moment’s doubt as to her own potential. She has done this, she says, because she wanted to be an example to her four children so that they understood the value of higher education.
It is called walking the way you talk, Caldwell muses. And she would know. In the ten+ years as a custodian at A&M-Central Texas, she has logged about 26,000 miles – 1,000 more miles than the circumference of the globe – and in the wee hours of the night – pushing and sometimes pulling her heavily laden four wheeled custodial cart filled from top to bottom with all manner of compartmentalized cleaning tools of the trade.
Her weapons of choice include a supply of paper towels, trash bags, and toilet paper. A cordless Dyson vacuum cleaner, large yellow bucket with attached wringer, ruddy gray solid plastic 55-gallon trash can, half dozen wet floor warning signs, carpet shampoos, dust pans, mops, brooms, spray bottles, red rags, and blue latex elbow length gloves, and a cornucopia of specialized utensils – the mop head of one resembles a larger-than-life fluffy yellow dandelion.
That one, she says, is not for wishing unless the wish being made is for safety regulation clean air ventilation. Turns out, she confirmed knowledgably, that cleaning is, most definitely not, just cleaning. The university, she said, complies with the Association of Physical Plant Operators Level 2 cleaning standards. And that is a high standard indeed.
Every. Day. Top to bottom and left to right floor to ceiling clean.
And on her meager $8.25 per hour, she dared to pursue her degree, undistracted by the fact that she was going to work when most people were going home and taking not one but four or more classes instead of sleeping – squeezing in just enough rest to wake up by 5 p.m. and start the whole cycle all over again. Because, she repeated, this dream of becoming a teacher wasn’t going to make itself happen.
By 2019, Caldwell had officially transferred to A&M-Central Texas declaring a teaching major, and her advisor, Yvonne Imergoot, made use of every single one of all the credit hours she had earned at Central Texas College.
About a year into her studies, Caldwell faced a potentially career-stopping obstacle, discovering that if she stayed on the traditional teacher preparation and certification track, she would have no other choice than to quit her job in order to take and complete student internship courses required for certification which, by necessity, were only offered traditional daylight hours because that is when the schools are open.
Had it only been a year earlier, it wouldn’t have been an issue, she said. But her work schedule had changed from the overnight shift to the daytime shift which conflicted with the courses she needed to take. She had requested a shift change and was told no. And there she was, she said. Stalled. Quitting her job was not an option, she said. She is a mom. And every mom knows that kids like to eat.
There was another way. A way that was longer, and maybe even less certain, but a way that kept her job intact: the Master of Arts degree in teaching. And it was a pathway designed to accommodate alternative certification.
From where the grit comes in a situation like this is different for everyone. For Caldwell, she told herself that she hadn’t worked this hard to surrender to an obstacle – even a big one.
She changed her major to liberal studies, and by 2020, she graduated – at the time, the first in her family – and immediately enrolled in the graduate degree program that offered a track for alternative certification. By August 2024, she graduated with an A- grade point average and a well-worn certification test preparation manual.
One of the things Caldwell believes in is that an obstacle only has the power a person is willing to surrender to it. And, she laughed, she doesn’t have one iota of surrender to her.
“I knew when I started that I would never give up quit on becoming a teacher,” she said. “I wanted my children to see me really work for it, so they know they, too, can overcome anything.”
But her journey hasn’t been just about the grit. She is buoyed by the human, the humorous, and sometimes ironic moments that have happened along the way. Like the fact that her big dream was made possible by a humble minimum wage job while her gloved hands were polishing mirrors, scrubbing toilets, and vacuuming miles of carpet.
“It isn’t like everyone even knew that I was a custodian and a college student and then a university student and then a graduate student,” she said. “And it wasn’t something I wanted to appear to brag about. I just wanted to put my mind to it without any special attention.”
She may not have realized it at the time, but Caldwell got from A&M-Central Texas faculty and staff the same generous heaping of encouragement and assistance – without the faintest idea from anyone that she was the same person who kept their toilets clean.
For example, she said, it was Morgan Lewing, Ph.D., an associate professor and chair in the College of Education and Human Development, who guided her toward the master’s degree.
“We were both there in his office, and he was so great to me, explaining the process,” she began, trying to suppress a laugh. “And as we sat there talking, I thought of all the times I had been working on his floor, cleaning the restrooms when he tried to use them, and I had to say, ‘No. You can’t come in here.’ I kept waiting for him to recognize me as that person who had shooed him away.
He did not, she added. Or if he did, she thinks, he never let her know he had recognized her as the building’s custodian. Maybe, she thinks, it is because he cared more about her dream of becoming a teacher than he did he did about the number of times she directed him away from a temporarily closed restroom.
Today, Caldwell studies for the alternative certification examination that will allow her to call herself a teacher. She was hired last year as an administrative assistant in the facilities services office and a part-time custodian -- sometimes during the week and even on Sundays.
Tuns out, once an around-the-clock workaholic, always an around-the-clock workaholic. And, in her case, a decade of work can be measured in degrees: in her case, an undergraduate and graduate degree. And, last but not least, a passing score on the teacher certification exam.
“I am taking the certification coursework through Iteach,” she said, adding that she hopes she will be finished with the certification review and ready for the real thing by August 2025.
Her boss, Shawn Kelley, the director of facilities services, cannot say enough good things about Caldwell. And yes. He has known all along that her dream was to become a teacher.
“Jessica is the kind of person who has a keen eye for detail and learns very quickly to figure out how things work – and don’t work,” he said. “She is invaluable to us, and we wanted her as an administrative assistant because she is just that good.
“Every single one of us know that she’ll be a fantastic teacher someday and always a part of our A&M-Central Texas family.”