He took bringing work home with him to a whole new level — by making work his home.
After 17 years of cleaning up after students in Albany schools, head custodian Timothy Walters decided to ditch the commute altogether and secretly move into the very building he was paid to maintain.
Walters, 36, said he began staying at Hackett Middle School because he had few other options.
“I had nowhere else to go,” Walters told The Post. He explained that he had been living with his sister and her boyfriend, but the couple needed some space to work through problems of their own.
Walters turned a tucked-away space inside Hackett Middle School in upstate New York into his makeshift home.
He said financial pressures left him unable to afford a place of his own.
“I was already paying my partner child support for our four teenage children and I didn’t have enough to get my own place,” Walters said.
The arrangement eventually caught up with him. In May, the Albany school district suspended Walters without pay while officials investigated the situation. He ultimately resigned on June 23, district spokesman Ron Lesko told the Times Union.
Walters had admitted months earlier, in October, that he had converted a fourth-floor room above the school auditorium into an improvised studio apartment. The unlikely living quarters reportedly included several beds, a mini fridge and an assortment of furniture.
And he wasn’t always there alone.
Walters said his four teenage children would sometimes stay with him at the school on weekends when they were in his custody. With the building largely empty during those stretches, their unusual weekend setup apparently went unnoticed.
The fourth-floor room Walters called home had been sitting unused for years, he said.
For months, the longtime custodian managed to keep his unusual living arrangement under wraps. But during the final week of April, his secret was uncovered by chance as school officials investigated an entirely different matter.
Albany City School District officials were reviewing security footage as part of an investigation into custodians suspected of submitting questionable overtime claims. Walters was not accused of taking part in the alleged scheme, but the footage revealed something else: He appeared to be at the school nearly all the time.
That discovery raised questions about why Walters was spending so many hours inside the building — ultimately exposing the makeshift home he had created upstairs.
Before moving into the school, Walters had been staying with his younger sister and her boyfriend. He said he eventually felt that his presence was getting in the way of the couple’s privacy and decided to leave.
Rather than tell his sister where he was actually going, Walters let her believe he had found a regular apartment of his own.
