What Your School Cleaners Should Be Doing To Combat Coronavirus

Everyone is talking about Coronavirus.

Whether it’s the jokes about toilet paper, concerns over travel, or concerns about the health of you and your loved ones, it’s the topic of the day.

School Principals and Business Managers are busy making contingency plans. But what are your school cleaners doing to help minimise the risk of infection?

We are helping Perth schools in two ways:

1. Extra disinfection of high-touch areas
2. Response plan in case of school shutdown

1. Extra disinfection of high-touch areas

The virus spreads via person-to-person contact. As a preventative measure, we have adjusted the cleaning schedules in each of our Perth schools to include daily disinfection of high-touch areas. In schools, the key traffic areas include:

• Door handles
• Light switches
• Water fountains
• Desks (student and staff office)
• Handrails
• Toilets
• Faucets
• Sinks

We have taken these extra precautions on ourselves, without being asked by school administration. Our priority is the health and safety of teachers, staff and students, which is why we are not charging any extra for providing this added service. We are driven by relationships, not profit.

At Intrepid Cleaning, we partner with schools, which means we are constantly thinking about extra ways we can help, in order to build a long term relationship with each school we clean for.

In addition to daily disinfection, some schools have asked to go one step further, requesting a full time cleaner to be onsite during school hours for continuous disinfection of high-touch areas throughout the day.

2. Response plan in case of school shutdown

At the time of writing (12 March 2020) only 4 schools in Australia have been closed after students tested positive — two schools in Sydney and two in Melbourne. No Perth schools have closed, but we like to be prepared, which is why we have distributed our cleaning response plan to the schools we currently service.

In the event of a school shutdown triggered by coronavirus, we have a documented plan to deep clean the entire school during the shutdown period.

The plan involves:

• Deep clean and sanitisation of classrooms, offices and common areas using commercial grade disinfectants
• Use of broad spectrum germicidal products, with an effective rate >99.9999% on similar virus structures
• Timeline of 4 to 16 days, depending on size of school
• Application of sanitisation through a combination of direct surface, airborne, and electro-static spraying
• Focus on all surfaces (lockers, desks, as well as high-touch)

In the event of an extended school shutdown, schools may choose to deliver classes remotely through electronic or via e-learning methods over the internet.

Most schools are relaxing their attendance policies to allow students to easily self-quarantine.

School teachers and staff should also be promoting general hygiene tips to reduce the spread of infection.

General tips for staying safe

Public health experts have released lots of advice to try to stop the spread of the virus. The three main tips involve regular hand washing, cover your mouth to cough, limit touching of the face.

If you’d like more information or advice on how to protect your school from coronavirus, please get in contact with our team.