Page 80 - Security Today, May/June 2022

Student Safety
With so many students working together in close quarters, schools can be breeding grounds for infection. But as studies routinely show, simple interventions can substantially reduce absenteeism by providing a healthy, productive learning environment for students, teachers and staff.
As an administrator, you play a key role in creating a healthy and high-performing school environment. It starts with gathering stakeholders, including custodial and facility management personnel, to establish acceptable standards of environmental quality and safety. While much of the focus recently has been on indoor air quality (IAQ), these standards must also include effective cleaning to control contaminated sources and occupant exposures, with the goal of ultimately decreasing health risk. While the practice of Environmental Hygiene encompasses the effective cleaning of general surfaces, you can better control the spread of infectious disease agents by implementing Enhanced Environmental Hygiene, which identifies and targets key surfaces, “hot spots” or “high-contact touchpoints”— recognized as significant reservoirs of potential human disease
agents. Such surfaces require more frequent attention to effective cleaning and disinfection.
Multiple studies have been published on pathogen transfer between hands and surfaces, as well as on microbial pathogen survival on the skin and on surfaces. One particular study showed that a hand contaminated with virus can contaminate up to seven other surfaces. When we touch an object, we transfer organisms to that surface and/or accumulate more and/or different organisms on our hand. In a crowded environment like a school, a surface contaminated by one student can be touched by many others, who then touch other surfaces as they move around. And then each of those contaminated surfaces can be touched again by other people, and so the touching and contamination process continues. This has been referred to as the surface touch network, which allows the transfer of microbes between hands and surfaces, resulting in a surface contamination network.
Research studies have also collectively indicated that enhanced environmental hygiene in schools, and targeted cleaning of biological
36 campuslifesecurity.com | MAY/JUNE 2022