The importance of cleanliness in school is to provide a healthy and safe environment for students. There are many issues related to hygiene that students and school employees have to face every day. Germs and bacteria are a part of life. Especially when discussing kids. Most of those can even harm them for life or affect the social and economic well-being of the school.
As the facility manager or the headmaster of a school, you need to make sure that the school building always stays clean. From classrooms and hallways to cafeteria and administrative offices, you and your staff must maintain the cleanliness in your school every day. Many students and teachers spend most of their time at school. So, maintaining cleanliness in school is vital for many reasons.
BETTER ENVIRONMENT FOR LEARNING
Creating an environment that is conducive to teaching means ensuring your lecture halls, classrooms, study, and living areas are all kept clean and tidy. Messy and dirty classes not only present a poor image, but they can also be distracting and negatively impact the pride students have in your school. What if the school fails to provide a clean environment? It means your school fails to provide the basic needs for the health and success of your students.
Schools not only impart knowledge but also play a significant role in shaping the personality of an individual. What a student learns in school is not just confined to the four walls of a classroom, but the whole school environment is a source of knowledge. Apart from education, a student learns lessons of discipline, honesty, and cleanliness from school. Therefore, a school needs to maintain a hygienic atmosphere.
Different cleaning tasks assigned to the students weekly help to keep the class clean and create a comfortable environment to study. While they learn to maintain a healthy environment in school, they will also carry out the same habit of keeping their space clean at home. Timetables, different settings, and the coming and going of hundreds of students and staff need to be taken into account before creating a cleaning schedule.
Not to mention the administration required for hiring and processing cleaning staff, which can be a full-time job in itself. Thus, more schools are outsourcing cleaning to external companies, ensuring high standards and a better environment all the time. Students are not the only ones who benefit from a clean and tidy school environment. Your school serves as your teachers’ workplace, and they deserve to look forward to each new day.
They perform their jobs better when they aren’t distracted by substandard surroundings. Teachers are more productive when they interact with children in healthy, clean classrooms compared to the opposite one. They are also less likely to become ill or suffer allergy symptoms in a neat school. Healthy, focused teachers will do a better job of teaching and are less likely to miss work. Maintaining schools’ cleanliness is a simple way to enhance learning for students, improve job satisfaction for teachers, reduce illness, and fight allergy symptoms.
PROMOTE ACADEMIC SUCCESS
Most people can study and work effectively with the clutter surrounding them, but some people prefer a tidy, organized workspace. Students are no different. In the organized space, students can think in a more organized manner, leading to enhanced learning. A recent study highlighted the relationship between cleanliness and learning. The researchers polled college students, asking them which of four levels of cleanliness they preferred when learning.
Eighty-eight percent of students reportedly became distracted by moderate inattention to cleanliness in their learning environment. Simple things like unswept floors, the buildup of dirt in corners, and smudge marks on surfaces were distracting. So, what level of cleanliness do students prefer? Eighty-four percent of the study sample preferred what the researchers called Orderly Spotlessness.
The floors were shining clean, all surfaces were smudge and dust-free, and trash cans contained only waste from that day. While this study was conducted on college students, it is safe to assume that younger students will also learn better in a clean environment.
FEWER ABSENCES AND SICK DAYS
When the students get sick, the teacher and staff do too. Keeping the school clean can help slow the spread of illness and reduce the number of students and teachers who fall ill. The flu virus can live on surfaces for 48 hours after it is deposited, infecting students who touch that surface. Simple cleaning and organization are not enough in this case. The cleaning staff must use disinfectant cleaners that kill germs on surfaces.
They must also know which surfaces to target – primarily surfaces that are touched often, like desks, doorknobs, computer keyboards, and hands-on learning tools. That is one of the advantages of outsourcing the experts that understand cleaning methods and tools. When students are better protected from the flu and the common cold, they are better able to learn and less likely to be absent from school.
Studies are frequently released on the cleanliness of school cafeterias, as they can be hot spots for germs and bacteria with hundreds of children using them daily. For many students, the meal they have in the school’s canteen is the only proper meal they have each day. As such, the cafeteria is one place in the school that needs to be kept cleaner than any other site in the compound.
For an efficient cleaning job, it’s advisable to hire the services of professional cleaners for your school. With such services, there is a guarantee that the job will be done to the expected standards. A dirty canteen will invite pests and decrease food safety. Some steps you can take to minimize the risk of an infestation are keeping food areas clean and routinely emptying bins. However, if an infestation takes hold, a professional pest control team will need to be called in to eliminate the pest safely. Well-kept cleanliness in your school’s cafeteria and kitchen will result in a decrease of absence students and teachers.
HEALTHIER SCHOOL BUILDING
The number of students suffering from allergy and asthma symptoms has skyrocketed in recent years, according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. Many of these students are allergic or sensitive to dust mites, mold spores, and pollen. They have a difficult time learning when they develop itchy eyes and runny noses while in school. Regular, thorough cleaning keeps the levels of allergens down, especially true in older buildings where mold may be an issue.
If you don’t already have a well-developed cleaning program in place, it can be hard to achieve goals and meet high standards. You can outsource a professional facilities management company, handing over the responsibility and administration and taking advantage of their experience and expertise in effective cleaning. It also means that your management team can concentrate on core priorities, ensuring you can continue striving for the academic success of your students.
Atalian Global Services provides professional cleaning services, and in the event of an infestation occurring, our pest team has a proven record of expertise, confidence, and experience to deal with the situation at hand. Contact us for a free consultation today and get more information about our services.
This article was originally published HERE.
