Kaivac Inc. Cleaning With Chronic Health Conditions Or High-risk Students In Mind Kaivac is keeping schools clean and healthy for everyone. P Public schools around the United States must contend with a variety of challenges: Teacher and student morale; student disci-pline; safety; and now, more than ever before, health. This gets even more compli-cated when school administrators and cus-todial departments must ensure that their facilities are hygienically clean enough for high-risk students or students with chronic health conditions. Those not involved with public schools may not have even heard the terms “high-risk” or “chronic health conditions” when referring to children before. Also known as students with specialized health care needs, the designation is relatively new, going back about 20 years. The term refers to students up to 17 years of age who are at increased risk for chronic physical, developmental, behav-ioral or emotional conditions that usually require attention and services beyond that generally required by children. Very often, these high-risk students are similar in intel-lect and learning ability to other healthier students; however, their health impair-ments can make learning much more diffi-cult for them. Cleaning For Medically Fragile Students Paul Acuff and Damon Raines, environ-mental services managers for the Catoosa County Public Schools in Ringgold, Georgia — about an hour north of Atlanta — are very familiar with this group of stu-dents. According to Acuff, several of the districtʼs 17 public schools have students with specialized health care needs requir-ing feeding tubes and may have a range of ailments that include oxygen dependence, nutritional supplement dependence and heart problems. “Our job is to have a [cleaning] protocol in place that keeps our schools hygienical-ly clean, not only for children that are at a higher risk, but for all students,” says Raines. “We believe we have accom-plished this by transferring our restroom cleaning from conventional to Kaivac No-Touch Cleaning ® systems.” The district now has 25 Kaivac units, according to Acuff, used by about 100 clean-ing people in the districtʼs 1.7 million square feet of school space. The two managers believe the Kaivac system is so important to the health and hygiene of their schools that working with their local distributor, Kelsan Inc., they require all of their custodial work-ers to complete a training program and be certified in no-touch cleaning. “The [Kaivac No-Touch] system has proven so effective that, at this time, we do not believe there is a need for implement-ing any special cleaning programs due to H1N1,” adds Raines. “Should we get a cluster of absences at a school, we will review our cleaning protocol; but right now, we believe we have everything under con-trol using the Kaivacs.” Other Benefits Of course, protecting the health of high-risk as well as all students, teachers and staff attending their schools is the primary con-cern of Acuff and Raines. But, it cannot be denied they have found other benefits to using the Kaivac system. “We have experienced a definite increase in worker productivity with the [Kaivac] machines,” says Acuff. “And, our custodial staff likes them so much that should a machine go down, they tell us itʼs almost like taking one of their arms.” The managers agreed there was another benefit to using the Kaivac No-Touch Cleaning system. “As soon as we walk in the door of one of our schools, we can tell a Kaivac system is being used,” says Acuff. “Not only are there no foul odors, [but] if we smell anything at all itʼs a pleasant minty fragrance that reminds us this school is clean and healthy.” CM Circle Product Information no. 151 This content was provided by Kaivac Inc. as part of a paid advertisement. For more information, please contact Kaivac directly at 1-800-287-1136 or www.kaivac.com. www.cmmonline.com 29
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