Photo: Carrie Doig/Facebook
Every school has a rock star. For the kids at Alan Shepard Elementary School in Bourbonnais, Illinois, that rock star is Steve Weidner. He's so popular that each and every second grade student lined up near the school's playground to get him to sign their yearbooks.
But Weidner, or "Mr. Steve" as the kids called him, is not the Principal or a teacher. He's actually the school's janitor!
"He pays attention to the kids ... he knows who they are," Principal Shirley Padera said about Weidner to WGNTV, "The kids know if anything happens, Mr. Steve is going to take care of it."
"I walked through the playground to get through the building and they saw me and started running," Weidner told ABC Good Morning America, "You get one, you get them all. Once they got a line I sat down." Weidner signed all 104 of the second grader's yearbooks after lunch, and 200 more from other classes that day.
After the school district posted the photo of kids lining up for Weidner's autograph on Facebook, the image was posted to reddit and went viral.
When interviewed by MTV, Weidner professed to be caught by surprise at his Internet fame. "I’ve been signing yearbooks for years, but this is the first time that a picture had been taken. This was also the first year it’s been this crazy, because it was later in the day and the kids were already done. But I didn’t expect more then a few comments from parents on the Facebook page," Weidner said, "It gives a lot of positive exposure to custodians and shows you don’t have have to be a teacher to play a big part in a kid’s life. That’s all I’m trying to do."