Without Effective School Cleaning Your School Could Become Germ Central

If you have children, you know that kids offer what certainly seems like the most effective way to transmit diseases, between themselves and even to us adults. With dirty fingers in noses and mouths and their innate desire to touch everything they see, kids are the ideal little germ manufacturers and distributors. Whatever colds and flus make the rounds each season seem to hit nearly every family. And did you know that absenteeism from cold, flus and the other viruses that make the rounds each year has a measurable negative impact on learning? So is your school cleaning company doing enough to keep your learning environment healthy and reduce the spread of disease in your school?

Where Should The Focus of Cleaning Schools Be?

The ISSA, the World Cleaning Industry Association, has conducted a great deal of research on school cleaning, where germs hide out and what school cleaning companies can do to better serve their educational facilities. In an effort to develop best practices for school cleaning, they looked at where schools were the dirtiest. What did they find?

• In a representative elementary school, classrooms were more likely to harbor bacteria and germs than restrooms.
• Desk and table surfaces and shared computer equipment was more than twice as dirty as toilets.
• Gym mats were some of the worst offenders, likely because many are cleaned with less than clean mops spreading around sweat, grime and germs.
• Hot spots like door handles, railings and other shared surfaces that see many hands over the school day were too often forgotten in school janitorial services.
• Most areas from the dirtiest to the cleanest LOOKED clean and would have likely passed a visual examination even though they were laden with illness causing bacteria.

Why Your School Janitorial Services Must Understand Touch Points

Touch points and hot spots are those areas that hands and fingers regularly touch throughout the day like those computer mouses, door handles, and stair railings. The research really confirms what we already know through common sense, the areas that are oft touched are the germiest. And the germiest areas, left uncleaned or improperly cleaned, transmit the most disease person to person. If your school cleaning service isn’t devoting enough time to these highly touched areas or cleaning with the frequency required to diminish their overall germ load, your students are likely to transmit and catch more illnesses which translates directly into more absences among your student body and staff. Is your school janitorial company regularly cleaning shared classroom computers? Do they properly disinfect door handles, railing and other hot spots? Quality school cleaning is about more that a visible clean, it must be about student and facility health and illness prevention.

School Cleaning Isn’t About Being A Germaphobe, It’s About Student Health & Performance

All this talk about germs, bacteria, viruses, touch points, hot spots and disease can make anyone start to feel like a germaphobe but effective school cleaning isn’t about paranoia, there are real associations between effective cleaning, health, absenteeism and school performance. A plethora of studies demonstrate that when school surfaces, including desktops, lunch tables and work tables were cleaned correctly and often, illness-related absenteeism was significantly reduced. With a demonstrable link between absenteeism and standardized test scores effective school cleaning impacts your student’s performance, your school’s performance and the overall wellness of students, educators and staff.

How School Cleaning Companies Can Limit the Spread of Disease On Campus?

The best and most effective school cleaning companies understand the science of cleaning. Whether you are in search of green school cleaning, university cleaning, private school cleaning or campus cleaning, your school janitorial service should understand how to protect the health of your facility through industry best practices. Your school cleaning company must know the difference between cleaning, disinfecting and sanitizing. They must fully appreciate the magnitude of hotspots and touch points. They must be aware that cleaning removes dirt from surfaces while sanitizing reduces the number of organisms down to a safer level. They know that disinfection is optimal for touch points, hot spots and those areas most likely to conceal pathogens like desks, door handles, shared computer equipment and others. Cleaning for health and the hard science behind cleaning has advanced, and if your Detroit school cleaning company hasn’t kept up with the change, innovation and advances, they are leaving you open to exposure and failing to give you the value and return you deserve from your school janitorial budget.

Getting the School Cleaning Services You Need to Keep Your Learning Environment Healthy

As a Facility Manager in a learning environment, you are committed to providing the cleanest school to protect your students and help them flourish. You have high expectations for students and staff and therefore, need a learning environment that supports those expectations through its cleanliness. Find the right janitorial service for your school and making good on this promise f excellence becomes easier.

At Stathakis, we work with schools of all kinds keeping their facilities clean and in ready to learn condition. We know how critical touch points and cleaning for health are in any learning environment. We also know that WHO cleans your school is as important as HOW they clean it which is why we go well beyond the requirements when it comes to screening and finding the right fit for our school customers. Can we help you? If you would like to learn how we help schools with effective maintenance all while staying on budget, please contact us at (800) 278-1884.