Common School Cleaning Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Maintaining a clean school isn’t easy. With hundreds of students walking to and from classrooms, large cafeterias full of food and drinks, and an incredible amount of high-touch surfaces, it takes a lot of energy and knowledge to keep a school clean regularly. However, these cleaning duties must be routinely fulfilled to maintain a safe and sanitary environment.

But what are the general challenges of school cleaning? And how can these obstacles be overcome? Continue reading this article to learn more about school cleaning, including:

Why school cleaning is important
Common school cleaning challenges
Signs your school may be struggling
How commercial cleaning services can help

Why Thorough School Cleaning Is Crucial

Having a clean facility is important for many industries. For schools, it’s essential. Clean schools keep students and teachers safe from harmful bacteria that build up on surfaces and prevent accidents that may occur from neglecting spills. Additionally, sick students risk contaminating the rest of their families, too. Proper cleaning also aids school facilities by extending their longevity. For example, clean tile floors and appliances last significantly longer than ones broken down by dirt and grime.

Failing to complete recurring cleaning duties can result in sickness outbreaks, costly repairs, and an unpleasant, unproductive facility for learning.

Typical School Cleaning Challenges

School cleaning presents a variety of challenges. Here are some of the most common obstacles internal cleaning crews must navigate.

High-Touch Surfaces

Where are the most germs in your school? The answer isn’t just one place—it’s every surface that experiences high volumes of touch-and-go traffic. These surfaces include desks, cafeteria trays, cafeteria tables, light fixtures, chairs, door handles, faucets, drinking fountains, and more. These high-contact surfaces are breeding grounds for germs that spread quickly and can cause sickness. Your routine for tackling these areas may vary from school to school, but it’s important to use school-safe disinfectants when possible.

Trash

Trash is a constant battle among schools. Kids tend to miss garbage cans or refuse to use them in the first place, leading to a build up of loose trash on hallway floors that can be tedious to clean up. Reinforcing students’ need to throw trash away where it belongs can help alleviate some of the burdens.

Dirty Floors

With hundreds of students stomping across hallway floors throughout the day, keeping tiles shiny and sparkling can be difficult. Cleaning towards the end of the day or early in the morning can result in the most efficient cleaning times, as students aren’t walking about and won’t be able to dirty the floors up again, negating your cleaning duties.

Improper Equipment

Too many schools are ill-equipped with the proper resources to tackle the average day’s cleaning responsibilities. It’s important to know what type of cleaning solutions are best and keep them stocked at your facility. And if any equipment upgrades are required, it’s worth bringing up.

Restrooms

Depending on the age range of your school, restrooms can often take longer to clean than they usually would. Let’s face it: kids don’t always have the best aim. On top of that, bathrooms are often littered with wadded-up paper towels, torn toilet paper, and puddles of water. It’s best to clean bathrooms between periods and even close them off temporarily if possible.

Busy Halls

Navigating busy hallways can make the cleaning process a task in itself, especially when trying to use larger pieces of equipment. When students aren’t traveling between classrooms, performing general cleaning between bells can eliminate the headache from performing your daily duties and speed up tasks.

Limited and Inexperienced Staff

While internal cleaning staff are helpful, they can sometimes be inexperienced. This creates gaps in cleaning knowledge, leading to neglected tasks and festering over time. This is why it’s essential to train all new hires properly on the best cleaning practices.

Proper school cleaning is challenging, especially without properly trained staff. Using commercial janitorial services for schools guarantees that every cleaner has ample experience and industry knowledge to do the job.

Commercial Janitorial Services for Schools

Signs Your School Is Struggling to Stay Clean

With the countless challenges that make school cleaning so tricky, it’s no wonder many educational facilities struggle to maintain a sanitary environment. There may be some clear signs within your school that indicate it is in desperate need of assistance, such as the following:

Consistently grimy floors
Large amounts of sick students
Dusty surfaces
Mold in corners
Regularly unsanitary restrooms
Untreated spills
Wet and musty floor mats
Loose trash and wrappers along the floors

If any of these factors are continuously present within your school, it could mean that your facility requires professional school cleaning services.

How School Cleaning Services Can Help

If your school struggles to maintain a clean and safe environment for its teachers and students, it might be time to invest in a commercial cleaning company. While there’s nothing wrong with in-house cleaning, this path is more likely to spawn problems. Using cleaning services is the most effective way to keep a school clean. They deal with dirt, grime, and germs by utilizing various cleaning methods, such as scrubbing floors and surfaces, using safe disinfectants, dusting, mopping, sweeping, wiping windows, and more.

Cleaning programs occur regularly, meaning you won’t need to worry about constantly hiring their services. Plus, using their services is generally more cost-effective than paying internal staff cleaners because they’re incredibly well-trained and knowledgeable in their field. With services like these, your school has the potential to remain in a presentable condition throughout the school year—and at a respectable cost.

Now, all that’s left is to find a trustworthy service provider.

Need an Extra Hand Keeping Your School Safe and Clean? Consider Brenner Facility Services

If you’re looking for school janitorial services in Massachusetts, you’re in luck. Brenner Facility Services has been in the commercial cleaning industry for over thirty years, gaining a wealth of valuable experience that has been used to provide superb facility cleaning to clients in the Eastern New England area. With high-quality work and dedication, we’ve established a strong bond between ourselves and our clients, letting them know that we’re not only prepared to perform a thorough job but that we’re here to make their lives easier in any way we can.

Ready for a safe and spotless school? Contact Brenner Facility Services to get started today.