Forest Glen Middle School principal Melvin Bradshaw doesn’t believe people understand the amount of work school district employees undertake for the new school year.

He explained this Friday, striding down freshly polished corridors gleaming underfoot, past custodians buffing windows crystal-clear and teaching staff decorating classrooms.

“It’s a good month they work just on facilities, as far as the floor and everything,” he said.

Peering through a classroom door, he added, “They have to take every one of those desks out and everything that’s on the floor put into the hallway.

“Then they strip the floor of the old wax, mop it down, and put new wax on. So it’s a good little process.”

The question Bradshaw is always asked, he said, is, “You only work 10 months?” But administrators effectively work the whole year, he said.

“At the end of the year, we’re getting ready for summer school and getting report cards out. Then, as soon as that’s over, we’re looking at data to determine what we need to work on next year.”

Then comes scheduling, he said. “Especially with middle school. You have sixth, seventh and eight grade all on different schedules, so you have to make different schedules for each grade level.”

“I don’t think the public really knows what goes on during the summer. As far as administrators, we’re working all year round. We try and work in a vacation here and there, but it’s a full-time experience all year.”

Amanda Jewett, a teaching veteran entering her 14th year and her third at Forest Glen, was stapling charts, diagrams, pictures and illustrations to a bulletin board on her classroom’s back wall.

Color, she said, is most important when it comes to capturing students’ attention and teaching them something without them hardly realizing it.

“I have a few things left to put up to make it colorful as well as educational,” Jewett said. “The main thing is the bulletin boards, making those bright and attractive.”

Before a new school year, Jewett typically doesn’t need to worry quite as much about adorning every available surface with educational material. But this year she has changed classrooms.

“You never know what you’re going to get,” she said of encountering new students. “It’s an experience every year.

“I’m ready to go. If we had to start next week, I’d be ready.”

Early next month, Meredith Marshaleck will front her first class as a fully-fledged educator. But on Friday, the seventh-grade math teacher was grappling with something perhaps even more daunting: assembling Walmart bookshelves.

“I have put together Ikea furniture, and that’s what I was expecting; but I needed real tools for this one,” she said.

On the whole, Marshaleck’s preparations were coming together “slowly but surely,” she said.

According to district spokeswoman Bethanne Bradshaw, a “variety of preventative maintenance tasks and school-wide spruce-ups” are completed over the summer.

Tasks performed either in rotation or as needed include painting, gym floor refinishing, replacing carpets and tiles, heating and air-conditioning maintenance, landscaping and preparing athletic fields, Bradshaw wrote in an email.

Other summer projects, Bradshaw says, include mobile unit roof sealing, line-stripping in parking lots, retrofitting lights with energy-efficient bulbs, and installing new heating and air-conditioning units where needed.

The human resources department works hard to fill vacant classroom positions, she said. A handful of new administrators also are taking the helm this year, including a new principal at Elephant’s Fork Elementary and new assistant principals at Elephant’s Fork, John F. Kennedy Middle, King’s Fork High and Nansemond River High.

Pre-service workshops focus on staff development, prepping educators for “new initiatives, new textbooks, new programs.”

Bradshaw also wrote that principals and assistant principals are getting familiarized with a new professional evaluation method, which includes student performance for the first time, and a new online “professional development and classroom instruction observation tool.”

Meanwhile, new teachers, like Marshaleck, undergo three additional days of orientation before veteran educators return.

Back at Forest Glen, Melvin Bradshaw says all the work is worthwhile. Motioning to the 47-year-old building’s newly polished floor, he said, “You can tell how much a difference it makes when you walk in the door … it makes an impression.”