David J. Frank Landscape Contracting has maintained institutional and commercial properties across Wisconsin for more than 65 years. A college campus has seasons filled with slow times and busy times. So, campus work gets planned around each university’s schedule.

Call 262-255-4888 or contact us online to talk through your academic year.

Campuses come in all sizes. A small private college might be one quad and a few residence halls. A state university can cover hundreds of acres with an athletic complex, a research park, and several parking structures.

Either way, the program starts with a walk of the whole property alongside the facilities director.

Foot traffic and turf

Students walk in straight lines. The diagonal across the quad shows up by the third week of the fall semester and stays until the ground freezes.

That’s why the repair work waits for summer. Crews aerate the packed strips and overseed them while the campus is empty.

Here’s the thing about the paths that come back worn every year: they’re showing the campus where a walkway belongs. A paved route costs less over five years than resodding the same corner each August.

Beds beside the residence halls take a different kind of abuse. Bikes lean on the shrubs, and moving carts flatten the edges. Tougher plant material goes in there, and repairs get scheduled for the week after move-in.

Summer is the working window

Students leave in May and return in late August. Nearly every large project on campus fits inside that gap, including turf renovation, irrigation repairs, and the heavy pruning that can’t happen over parked cars.

The last week before move-in is the real deadline. Mulch is fresh, edges are recut, and the quad is green. Families arrive that week with cameras, and they form an opinion of the school from the grounds before they meet a single professor.

Our commercial maintenance crews plan the whole summer backward from that Saturday. Admissions tours run all summer, too, so the standard has to hold from June on.

Parking lots and drive lanes

Commuter lots and parking structures take up a surprising share of campus acreage. Islands and lot edges get pruned for sight lines.

And snow storage areas get chosen in the fall, so January’s plow piles stay away from young trees.

Winter

First classes start at 8, which puts the sidewalks on the clock for about 7. Crews work through the night on storm days.

Our snow and ice management puts trucks on the lots and service drives and hand crews on sidewalks, stairs, and building doors. Ramps and accessible routes go first, because a wheelchair has no way around a drift.

Winter break changes the order. The residence halls are empty, so the library and the athletic buildings move to the front of the list.

Salt leaves its mark by spring, too. Every April there’s a brown strip of turf along the busiest walks. Those edges get reseeded after the thaw, and salt-tolerant plants go in the beds beside the main routes.

Talk to our team about campus snow and grounds service at 262-255-4888 or send us a message.

Trees

Plenty of campus trees have a story attached. A memorial planting. A class gift. Taking one down takes more than a work order.

Our certified arborists prune during winter dormancy, cable and brace the trees worth saving, and mark dead limbs over walkways and building entrances. Removal comes last, and the grounds director hears about it first.

New commemorative trees get placed with their full mature size in mind.

The main quad

The open lawn at the center of a campus does several jobs. It’s a study spot, a frisbee field, and the seating area at graduation.

Irrigation there runs overnight, so nobody walks through spray on the way to an 8 a.m. class. Zones get shut off around the tent and chairs the week of commencement.

The administration building steps, the entrance sign, and the plaza by the student center are where the cameras go. Those spots get seasonal color timed for homecoming and commencement, with pansies in spring and mums by October. Campuses that want it can add holiday decorations at the main entrances before the semester ends.

Evening walks matter, too. Path lighting from our outdoor lighting work goes in at walking height along the routes students use after the library closes.

New outdoor space

Campuses keep adding outdoor rooms. A plaza beside a new student center. A courtyard between two residence halls. A rain garden catching runoff from a new lot.

Our design-build team handles these from concept through installation, and our bid-build crews build from an architect’s plans. Public universities usually buy through a formal bid, which is why both options are available.

Indoors, our interiorscape work is a smaller piece of campus business. Atriums and student unions are where it shows up most. Light varies a lot across those rooms, so plants get picked for the dimmest spot, and a crew visits on a schedule to swap out anything that fades.

Starting an account

The first conversation is about the calendar. Facilities directors send the dates that matter, and the program gets built backward from them.

We keep a written map of each property with irrigation zones, utility lines, and the tree inventory, so the knowledge stays with the account in case there is campus staff turnover.

Many campuses already run their own grounds crew, and that works well alongside us. We cover the peaks, like the summer renovation push and the snowfall that outruns a small staff, and leave the daily routine to the people who know the property best.

Call us at 262-255-4888 or contact us online to plan your academic year.