Schools have a duty to provide a clean, sterile, and safe environment for their students, teachers, and visitors. A clean environment is essential to prevent the spread of illness and germs.
But achieving consistent and regular cleaning in a school environment is difficult, and the pandemic has raised an already high standard for cleaning to keep everyone safe.
There are significant barriers to effective cleaning and maintaining school facilities. In this article, we explore some of these unique challenges to keeping schools clean.
Increased Use Of School Facilities For Events
Schools these days are used for a variety of school and community events and other purposes. Often after an event, the administration barely has enough time to do a surface clean before the preparations begin for the next event.
Having the required resources, staff, and time available to do a deep clean and sanitation of facilities after an event is especially difficult when there’s so little time between events and gatherings.
Inadequate Staff
Speaking of required resources, most schools operate on small janitorial and custodial staff numbers. This often results in unsatisfactory deep cleaning of the school. Sometimes the school’s teachers, staff, and even students are asked to pitch in to get all the necessary cleaning done.
While teachers and other staff can help out with the cleaning at surface level, they typically don’t have the training, experience, or equipment to properly clean and disinfect a school. And when administrators employ teachers to take on cleaning tasks, this inevitably takes away time from their primary teaching responsibilities.
Limited Funding
Many schools operate on razor-thin budgets which can make it difficult to hire adequate cleaning and janitorial staff. When schools are underfunded, they often have to decide between hiring sub-par cleaning services or hiring them less frequently.
Large Volume & Variety of People
The sheer number of people that pass through a school on any given day makes them difficult places to keep clean. Different ages, different allergies, different hygiene standards all make it difficult for everyone to do their part to keep school spaces clean. With so many kids running and playing, they easily pass germs around.
Some areas such as lockers, bathrooms, and desks can harbor significant levels of germs that require more frequent cleaning to keep safe and sanitary. With the massive amount of wiping down surfaces, mopping, and sweeping that happens every day, deep cleaning can often take a backseat or get forgotten about entirely.
Fabrics & Furniture
The furniture in schools can present unique cleaning challenges that other places do not. Especially found in primary schools, a large variety of soft & plush furniture in a school creates a good environment for germs to thrive and are particularly hard to clean effectively.
Professional cleaning services understand how to safely clean each type of surface and material found in a school.
Lack Of Training & Frequently Changing Standards
There have been many new cleaning and sanitation protocols in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s new training, and symptoms, and warning signs to watch out for along with overall heightened anxiety about germs and bacteria in general.
Not only do professional cleaning services need constant up-to-date training, but so do the teachers and administration staff. This can difficult to organize and provide adequate training teachers.
Bring In The Professionals
As we can see, cleaning a school is no easy job. There are multiple challenges that come from all directions, and any one of them can present an obstacle to safe and effective school cleaning.
While it may be tempting to save a few dollars by using the school staff to do some of the work, they aren’t trained to the job effectively on an ongoing basis. You want to hire a cleaning company with a rich history of cleaning educational facilities.
Regular cleaning and sanitization of schools need to be a top priority. Clean schools improve morale among both teachers and students and illness-based absences.
Picture Perfect Cleaning has the experience and industry knowledge to tailor cleaning routines and schedules around the needs of each client. With over 10 years of professional cleaning experience under our belt, you can trust us to provide quality cleaning services for your school every time.
