The goal is to purchase tools, supplies and contract cleaning services based on the new standard. products to kill germs, resulting in a dirty en-vironment on several levels. The result over time is often disastrous and can be germ-ridden, chemically-pollut-ed and dusty student and staff spaces cre-ated by not having the proper resources and staffing to do the job right. As I travel around the country working with school districts implementing Process Cleaning for Healthy Schools, I see school district after school district suffering the same problem: Broken custodial budgets forcing schools to either outsource or reduce staffing to the point of inadequate custodial services. We owe it to our children to protect them from this dangerous trend and I can see no other solution than to lobby state and local school boards to adopt the same principle they use to measure student achievement through national standardized testing scores. We need — and they deserve — a national “Clean Schools Standard.” ISSA — and the Cleaning Industry Re-search Institute (CIRI) — have helped us to get to this point. Image courtesy of HongqiZhang/iStockphoto/Thinkstock The Clean Standard identifies the need for better cleaning, not necessarily more chem-istry, miracle cleaners or lower prices. It raises the bar, makes possible a much-needed National Clean Standard, and finally defines cleaning properly as the removal of potentially harmful substances, not the ad-dition of them, or the rearranging of soil, through misguided efforts. It gives cleaning professionals who invest properly in the right labor and processes to actually prevent or remove soils the ability to compete in the open market. What’s In The Standard? Without a standard, who can say what a clean and safe school house is? That’s where the Clean Standard helps. “The goal of the Clean Standard: K-12 Schools is to provide schools with a useful tool that will help them objectively measure and monitor the level of cleanliness at their facilities. The clean standard establishes a framework to assess the cleanliness of a school’s interior high touch surfaces will change the way we deal with microbial pests indoors, all to the benefit of children, teachers and communities. As Silent Spring informed the public about the hazards caused by human intervention using DDT to kill pests in the outside envi-ronment, the Clean Standard shows us there is a better way — i.e., through cleaning, not necessarily poisoning. How It Helps Public Schools There is a downward spiral in the way public schools budget for cleaning, and why. A public school has an obligation to the taxpayer to be transparent in all its trans-actions; therefore, when cleaning is out-sourced, anyone can find out how much the winning janitorial bid was for last year’s cleaning contract. The “smart” new bidders often just place a bid less than last year’s and may be re-warded with the business to the detriment of better cleaning and health. Low-bidders may cut costs by clean-ing less (reducing labor) and sometimes by “bombing” environments with more toxic FREE INFO: Reader Service 206 or CMMOnline.com/freeinfo www.cmmonline.com 17
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