Page 20 - School Planning & Management, November 2017

FACILITIES DON’T TOUCH THAT!
Still, flus and colds continue to produce empty seats in the nation’s K-12 schools year after year.
Can better cleaning and disinfecting by maintenance staffs help to drive the incidence of illness in schools down to lower levels?
Cleaning Up Infectious Hotspots
Hotspots are surfaces touched so fre- quently by so many people that those sur- faces build up infectious levels of germs. Consider the conveyor belt at the cash register in the grocery store. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people may touch those belts between disinfectant cleanings.
K-12 hotspots include student desktops, the teacher’s desktop, doorknobs, black- boards, bulletin boards and everything else that students and teachers touch throughout the day.
Athletic departments produce hotspots touched by many, too: footballs, baseballs, basketballs, wrestling mats, chinning bars and more. Many dirty, sweaty hands touch school athletic equipment.
Infectious matter falls off of these sur- faces and onto the floor. The shoes that walk the floors in school day in and day out add to the germs in school classrooms and hallways.
The maintenance department’s respon- sibility, then, is to disinfect these hotspots and keep them disinfected throughout every room in every school and hallway in the school district.
“Custodial staffs are pretty good about cleaning and disinfecting school lavatories. Best practices include cleaning the toilets as well as the doors to the booths as well as the latches on the doors,” Hicks says.
It is, however, easy to overlook certain surfaces. Take computer keyboards, for in-
stance. Does your district’s cleaning policy mention wiping down keyboards as well as the screens on laptops and monitors?
“Another place that doesn’t get disin- fected as often as it should is the teachers’ lounge,” Hicks says. “There are plenty of surfaces in teachers’ lounges that need attention: the coffee pot handle, the handle on the refrigerator as well as the chair arms and tabletops.”
How much more could there be? “People carry body lice,” continues Hicks. “Their bites can cause rashes and itching. Body lice don’t fly or run, and the best way to get rid of them is to vacuum thoroughly and
to follow up with a pesticide instead of a disinfectant.”
Keeping school buildings free of germs and infectious materials is and will always be a challenge for a maintenance depart- ment. And, of course, one of the main re- sponsibilities of the maintenance directors is to educate the maintenance crew: what has to be cleaned? How and how often must cleaning occur? What tools are appropriate for this dirt and those pests?
Maintenance and cleaning has always been a much more important job than has traditionally been thought. It is a sig- nificant part of caring for the health and welfare of children and teenagers in the nation’s K-12 schools. SPM
20 SCHOOL PLANNING & MANAGEMENT / NOVEMBER 2017
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