People sometimes ask what the benefit to hiring a dedicated cleaning team for an organization such as a private school would be. For instance, most schools have a janitorial crew. Why couldn’t this all be handled in-house?
Or beyond that, what are some specific examples of cleaning needs that arise for private schools in the area?
For starters, some private schools where students may be attending from elsewhere (even abroad) offer living quarters for each school year. This is similar to how a college works, except in colleges students are generally on their own as far as cleaning goes.
With institutions such as the American Hebrew Academy, when it was active in Greensboro, these domiciles were regularly maintained by a cleaning team to keep carpets vacuumed, surfaces cleaned, and common areas disinfected.
Largely, this helped to keep students and staff healthy and prevent outbreaks during cold and flu season.
The cleaning team was able to quickly get control of a flu outbreak.
This example seems especially relevant now. One time a few years back students were preparing for a field trip. It was one where parents had paid money for their kids to embark, so understandably no one wanted their child to end up in a situation where they had to miss it last minute.
Unfortunately one child wasn’t feeling well that morning, but the mother had banked on it being a stomach bug that would pass. It wasn’t, and ended up being a pretty severe case of the flu that ended up spreading to a mass number of students over the following week. Teachers, too.
It was severe enough that the administrators decided to close the school for 2 weeks while cleaning crews thoroughly deep cleaned the entire facility.
An important component of that deep cleaning as the cafeteria and food prep areas, which already have high sanitation standards.
New practices were put in place as students re-entered classes to ensure a repeat outbreak didn’t happen, and the school was successfully able to finish out the school year with no other snags.
The dedicated outsourced cleaning team was also a more affordable solution.
Any educational facility large enough to have a whole cleaning team needs to be managed. That ends up meaning additional staff for that role, with payroll and benefits for all.
In some cases that can end up being a lot more expensive than paying a flat fee for a dedicated cleaning crew that is managed internally.
Our concept of a dedicated, outsourced cleaning crew combines the “always there” convenience of an in-house cleaning team with the affordability of an outsourced service. We dedicated an entire team of our own staff to work exclusively at that private school and augment the in-house staff. Members of that cleaning team could be rotated in and out as needed for vacations, sick days, etc., but generally there was a consistent group.
The school could also benefit from our commitment to continuing education standards on NC cleaning best practices, regulations, and health codes.
For security reasons regarding the school’s internal security department, it was also useful being able to see the same cleaning folks each day. Keeping an eye on who comes and goes each day becomes a lot more chaotic when there are new faces all the time, and much easier when there is consistency.
That’s something that is generally seen as a high priority for schools of any kind.