School Cleaning Guide for Summer

An Interview With Michael at No More Dirt

Regardless of whether your school is big or small, for younger or older students, one thing remains the same — your school gets a lot of traffic and a lot of germs. Gyms, cafeterias and classrooms filled with tables, desks and equipment, plus the floors and doors leading to all of the rooms, are frequently touched by many students throughout the year.

By the time school is out for the summer, despite your best cleaning efforts throughout the year, a thorough cleaning is necessary — not just to clean the visible dirt, but also to sanitize and even disinfect the building to prepare for the next school year. You’ve decided to commit to a thorough summer cleaning, but how can you be sure you’re cleaning all the right places? What are the most important areas to clean? And how can you ensure they’re thoroughly cleaned? How far in advance do you have to plan for a school cleaning service? What’s it going to cost? You need a school cleaning guide for summer.

To answer these questions and more, we sat down — at a nice coffee shop in Hayes Valley — with our Director of Operations, Michael Henriques, to talk about school cleaning services in San Francisco. Many of his school cleaning tips pertain to schools everywhere, but there are a few unique cleaning tips for schools in San Francisco and the Bay Area. With the temperate weather in the Bay Area, the majority of campuses have a large amount of outdoor spaces around their buildings and less indoor hallways than schools in other regions

In our interview with Michael, we covered best practices for cleaning when schools are closing for summer, school cleaning projects that are best to accomplish while the students are away and school cleaning projects that should be done just before the students return for the year. We’ve included the highlights from our interview with Michael below, along with some additional information that may be helpful to you as you consider school cleaning service.

Where should someone start if they decide to hire a school cleaning service for summer?

The first thing that comes to mind is planning ahead. So many schools in the San Francisco Bay Area use their space in the summer for camps and other activities. One of the most important steps is to coordinate and set aside time for school cleaning projects you want to accomplish.

Most schools close somewhere between the end of May and mid-June. Ideally, the first step on any school cleaning guide is to talk to your No More Dirt Account Manager — or begin seeking out a school cleaning service — about what cleaning projects you’re interested in by early May. This gives us time to get you a quote for the services, walk through the areas you want us to clean, check your summer events calendar and make a game plan. When everything happens in the right order, it gets you the most value out of our services and sets you up for a successful school year.

If you haven’t yet made plans for a deep school cleaning this summer, it isn’t too late. While beginning your planning before school is out for the summer is ideal, as long as we’re able to accommodate your summer, we’ll be happy to provide you with a school cleaning service.

While cleaning can and should be happening throughout the school year, the opportunity for a deep cleaning is often only over the summer when students and teachers aren’t there to continuously add to the dirt and germs after they’ve been removed. Getting this deep cleaning done in time for you to welcome students, faculty and staff back to the facility gives you the opportunity to start with a clean slate.

During the school year, germs accumulated among students and teachers throughout the year can cause infectious illness in addition to triggering asthma and allergies — all of which cause absenteeism. It’s important to research the products used to clean your school, as some of the cleaning products can also trigger asthma and allergies for students and teachers. That’s why we use all green cleaning products — good for you and for your environment.

What are the most common areas that are requested for school cleaning service over the summer?

Flooring

Floors are high-traffic areas in the most literal sense. Students, teachers, staff and visitors are constantly walking up and down your hallways and in and out of your classrooms. They get dirty, and while you may not have people spending a lot of time sitting on or touching your floors, keeping them clean improves the appearance of your school and the morale of your students and staff. What do we do to clean floors? For hard-surface floors, we scrub them and then strip and wax them. We also deep clean carpets.

Cleaning floors is very time-consuming, so you want to get that started as soon as possible in order to clean all of the areas or flooring before the staff and teachers return to set up all the classrooms to prepare for the upcoming school year.

Outdoor Areas

San Francisco Bay Area schools often have a lot of outdoor spaces — open hallways and courtyards. It’s beautiful for the campus, but it also means pollen, natural debris, bird droppings, spider webs, grease spots and gum can cause eye-sores and sanitation issues all over the place. To restore your outdoor spaces to their natural beauty and keep those outdoor surfaces as sanitary as possible, we often do a deep pressure washing of the sidewalks and courtyard areas, as well as any pick-up and drop-off loading zones. These outdoor spaces could also include some exterior building cleaning.

Classroom Accessories

While classrooms are often the focus of cleaning plans throughout the school year, there are some classroom accessories that can’t be deep cleaned while school is in session. Students are using door handles, desks and chairs every day. Bookcases, cubbies and other storage areas are often full during the school year but empty in the summer, creating an opportunity to clean these areas. When teachers return late in the summer to prepare their classrooms, having a clean slate to begin with is great for morale.

High Areas

The saying, “out of sight, out of mind,” is often true when it comes to cleaning, particularly with areas that are above your reach. Tops of shelves, lights, air vents and other upper surfaces are often minimally cleaned, if at all, during the school year — leaving them in need of a deep cleaning in the summer. Dusting these high areas that are out of reach is often a part of the deep cleaning services we provide, revealing surfaces that look like new after the dust has been removed.

Lockers

I also recently did a project where we deep cleaned all the student lockers inside and out. It made a huge difference for the school. You may not think of lockers as being one of your high-traffic areas, but you forget that students cram everything and anything they can into those lockers. In this case, students had spilled sodas inside the lockers and attached stickers, leaving sticky residue, among other things. It was great to get the lockers cleaned — inside and out — not only for the students who would use them in the upcoming year, but also for the school’s overall appearance.

Cafeterias

In any school, the cafeteria often gets some cleaning through the floor cleaning and the high dusting, but cafeterias often need a deep cleaning of their own for a few reasons. Regardless of how careful and clean the cafeteria staff is, there are sure to be little pieces of food tucked away in corners and edges that need to be removed — or else you’ll develop bigger problems like pests and odors.

Many people wonder how to deal with pests in school cafeterias — the answer is in keeping the area clean. While keeping the area clean and free of the remnants of food may be enough to prevent pests, it’s not good enough for your cafeteria. Your cafeteria needs to be sanitized, or better yet, completely disinfected after it’s cleaned.

While the cleanliness of the cafeteria helps prevent pests and creates a sanitary environment, it also helps preserve the kitchen equipment. At No More Dirt, we follow school cafeteria cleaning guidelines. We’ve been cleaning commercial kitchens for decades and have the skills and experience to make sure your commercial-grade equipment is cleaned and maintained properly during the year and during the down-time of summer.

Gyms

Fill a room with a bunch of sweaty students or student athletes, and you’re sure to have a collection of dirt and germs. From cleaning, stripping and waxing the hard-surface floors to cleaning the forgotten crevices of the locker rooms, cleaning school gyms is something that shouldn’t be forgotten.

In addition to the floors and locker rooms, there are usually bleachers that feature plenty of areas for dirt to hide. The school gym is usually one of the larger common spaces in the school, and in addition to being used for sports and gym class, it may also be used for assemblies and other large student gatherings — more students equal more dirt and more germs. This one can’t afford to be missed!

Auditoriums

Much like gyms, auditoriums might be used for assemblies and large groups of students. It’s probably also used for concerts and theater shows that are open to the public. Unlike gyms, auditoriums often feature upholstery, which has its own set of rules for deep cleaning. To tackle cleaning in this high-traffic common area, we use a combination of cleaning techniques, cleaning everything from those high surfaces that seem impossible to reach to the crevices underneath the seats.

How should schools tackle deep cleaning school bathrooms?

This is one that teachers, parents and students all agree on — the deep cleaning of student restrooms is a top priority. While restrooms receive daily surface cleaning, some areas do build up, and they need to be addressed. I often work with my clients to deep clean over both winter and summer breaks.

Whether it’s the hidden corners in the stalls or a stray spitball on the floor — kids these days — it’s essential that your school bathrooms are deep cleaned and disinfected. The cracks and crevices of stall partitions could surprise you — this is another area that is very important to check and give them a thorough cleaning and disinfecting.

When we are hired as your San Francisco area school cleaning service, every nook and cranny is scrubbed down, including all plumbing fixtures like sinks, toilets and urinals. We also have the opportunity to freshen up and detail clean all of the soap and paper towel dispensers. Then we address floor deep cleaning — our process depends on the surface. Most frequently, a scrubbing machine is brought in to lift anything that could’ve stayed in place despite nightly sweeping and mopping throughout the school year.

What’s the most common summer cleaning project complication that arises when you’re working with schools?

While it is best to plan ahead, waiting too long to get a plan in place for the summer isn’t what creates the major complications. Rather, it’s often a miscommunication or lack of communication between my contact at the school and someone else on the team who plans the summer events that take place at the facility.

I want to re-emphasize a point I previously mentioned — one of the most important school cleaning tips — scheduling a time for a school cleaning project is one of the toughest parts, and it needs to be set up so everything can be accomplished. It’s vital to reach out to all members of the team, especially those who are coordinating summer camps, events or other building services so that we can ensure things are done at the right time and that the space we plan to clean will be accessible.

Are there any other areas that schools should be thinking about as they prepare their summer project cleaning list?

Absolutely! My school cleaning tips include a few additional areas that sometimes get forgotten. For classrooms and hallways, you should check the edges of the floors, along the baseboards and lower walls, as well as the baseboard itself — all of which could benefit from a strong scrubbing. Other areas to keep in mind are the main office and teacher lounges. These spaces make an impression on the staff and teachers, so keeping them thoroughly cleaned goes a long way.

I already mentioned classrooms, but specialty rooms like art and music rooms have their own specific needs and proper methods of cleaning. Be careful when trusting school cleaning services with these spaces — you don’t want to put just anyone in charge of cleaning around fragile instruments! You want to make sure you discuss these details with your school cleaning service.

The last major areas that come to mind are interior and exterior windows. Windows are almost never included in a regular service contract because budgets for schools don’t have room for that type of ongoing service throughout the year. Summer is the perfect opportunity to catch up on your school window cleaning.

There is a lot to clean over the summer; how are schools managing the cost of these projects?

Many schools already know that using their facility to host summer camps can be a great way to have a revenue stream in the summer time. For a lot of my clients, that income pays for all of their deep cleaning projects.

Aside from that, I can only speak to our pricing model. It’s flexible. With No More Dirt, many of our clients have a monthly school year cleaning contract with us. In the summer, we allow our clients to apply the value of their monthly school year cleaning service to their deep clean project costs — after all, school is on a break! It really helps our clients conquer their budget planning — and as we all know, for schools, that’s a critical element.

Do you have a final piece of wisdom to leave with us?

There’s really no better way to start a new school year than with a perfectly clean facility. Students, teachers, staff and parents all truly appreciate the refreshing feeling of returning for the new year with everything looking shiny and clean. It sets a great tone for everyone to get excited and focus on preparing for the school year instead of cleaning — leave that to us.

No More Dirt

No More Dirt is a San Francisco school cleaning service. We offer green cleaning services, so you can be sure our cleaning won’t leave any extra residue or remnants of chemicals that could be harmful for your students, teachers and staff.

Summer has already started, so call us soon at 877-776-6347, and we’ll give you a free quote for your summer cleaning services. Want to get started right away? We’ll get you set up with an Account Manager who can help you develop a plan for your summer cleaning service.

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