Keeping High Touch Surfaces Healthy and Safe
Keeping High Touch Surfaces Healthy and Safe
Summer means empty halls, classrooms, gyms, and cafeterias at educational institutions. This year, it is more important than ever to take advantage of less traffic in your school by scheduling deep cleaning, restoration, and maintenance for carpet, wood, and resilient flooring.
Creating and maintaining healthy indoor environments starts with the flooring. Whether your school has carpeting or hard flooring, keeping those surfaces clean and well-maintained is critical in providing a healthful environment for students and staff.
Flooring Surfaces Are High Touch
Because flooring surfaces are considered to be high-touch, they are easily contaminated. Aerosolized droplets from people coughing, sneezing, and talking are released and eventually land on the floor. The contaminants are then tracked throughout the school, spreading pathogens along the way.
“Regardless of the floor covering type, regular and effective cleaning and maintenance is essential to keep it dry and clean,” advises the EPA.
Deep Clean, Maintain, and Restore School Floor Surfaces Now
Carpet
Carpet and carpet tiles are flooring surfaces that foster a warm, welcoming atmosphere. Daily maintenance keeps the carpet looking fresh and clean. Removing debris from the surface and deep in the carpet improves indoor air quality and helps the carpet maintain its color and performance. Then, institute periodic and routine floor maintenance procedures and vacuum after using interim encapsulation or low moisture products.
LVT and Resilient
Luxury vinyl tile (LVT), vinyl composite tile (VCT), and other vinyl and resilient flooring surfaces are popular floor materials for schools. They help reduce noise levels and are easier to maintain than other surfaces with daily floor routines, such as dry mopping to remove dry soil and debris. But additional care is needed to extend the life of the vinyl, keep it looking good, and protect your investment. That’s why periodic maintenance, including deep cleaning, applying wax to floor finish and specialized sacrificial wear layers, and high-performance coatings, is recommended.
Wood
Sports flooring is often made of wood. No matter how meticulously wood floors are maintained, they will need to be refinished at some point. Sanding the floor down to the bare wood and applying seal, paint, and finish will restore the floor’s luster and ensure long life and best performance.
A Success Story: Terrazzo
Terrazzo, stone, and cement can be time-consuming surfaces to maintain. For example, St. Louis Park School had years of wax buildup covering their terrazzo floorings. Before hiring surface care experts, the school’s staff would spend hours applying wax to the nearly 40-year-old floors, which was costing the school an unnecessary amount of money and time and not doing the beautiful terrazzo floor any justice. The surface care team performed the restoration after school hours. They stripped countless layers of wax from the top of the floors and then beautifully restored the surface of the terrazzo. The team did not stop until the surfaces were perfect, leaving a very happy client.
A school’s environment plays a crucial role in the education of students. Learning is easier and more enjoyable for students and staff when the educational facility offers a positive impression and is safe.
About SOLID Surface Care, Inc.
To ensure your school’s flooring is clean, healthy, and safe for returning students and staff, be sure to use MISBO consortium partner surface care professionals like SOLID Surface Care.
SOLID provides expert solutions for the maintenance, revitalization, and restoration of all surfaces in educational facilities: classrooms, hallways, cafeterias, sports flooring, and other surfaces. In addition, SOLID can help you with post-COVID facility issues like removing sticker residue and restoring damaged floors from hand sanitizer drips. SOLID also offers abatement services and uses EPA List-N disinfectants to deep clean, sanitize, and disinfect carpet and flooring surfaces throughout the facility.