Illinois custodian helps ducklings reach safety for 29 years

Martin Ochoa starts his spring mornings the same way he has for 29 years at Western Avenue Elementary School in Geneva, Illinois: watching over ducklings as they leave the courtyard and make their way to safety. The school’s head custodian, known affectionately as “Papa Duck,” has become part of a ritual that now shapes the identity of the building and the people inside it.

Each year, newly hatched mallard ducklings are guided from the school courtyard, through the building and out the front door, to a pond area near a golf course across the street. The walk happens early in the morning before the bell rings, when the halls are quiet and the ducklings are small enough to need a careful hand. Ochoa, who has worked at Western Avenue Elementary for nearly three decades, said he planned to keep doing the duck-wrangling job for one more year before retiring.

The tradition reaches back into the school’s own history. Geneva Community Unit School District 304 says mallard ducks began nesting in the courtyards because they found them to be a safe place to raise their young. The school history page says the courtyards once had food, water and even a ramp to help ducklings reach the water, a detail that helps explain why the birds keep returning each spring.

Principal Casey O’Connell said duck imagery is woven throughout the school. “Everywhere you go, you will see a duck,” O’Connell said, underscoring how deeply the tradition has taken hold in the building and among families who know Ochoa by name. Western Avenue Elementary was built in 1964, expanded in 1988 to create 20 total classrooms, and added four more classrooms in 1995. Over time, the school’s architecture and the duck tradition became part of the same story.

What began as a practical effort to shepherd hatchlings to water has become a small civic ritual with a wider lesson about public service. Ochoa’s role is not written into a job title, yet it has helped define the culture of a school community in the western suburbs of Chicago, where children, staff and neighbors have come to associate spring with ducklings, a custodian’s steady hands and a promise that even the smallest lives will be looked after.