Team Cleaning Creates Consistency

Proteam

Aiken County Schools streamlined their cleaning process and created consistenct with help from ProTeam and a standardized Team Cleaning system.

Forty-two schools comprise Aiken County Public School District in South Carolina. Up until recently, every school approached cleaning tasks differently. Inconsistency in process, products, and training led to inconsistent cleanliness from building to building. So the county set out to make a change.

In pursuit of creating the best environment for students to learn and achieve, Aiken County Public Schools chose to implement a standardized cleaning system based on Team Cleaning with efficient ProTeam backpack vacuums. Blaine Riley, Education Program developer for Augusta Janitorial, has shepherded the transition. He helped blend the styles of Team Cleaning and zone cleaning to maximize efficiency for cleaners during the day.

In a K-12 setting, a cleaner must be present during the school day to clean as needed. In Aiken County’s hybrid system, those cleaners also tackle cleaning work by area type to stay as productive as possible. For example, an Aiken County day cleaner may clean offices or common areas in a zone concept. They would perform all cleaning tasks within that building, including vacuuming with an upright vacuum. The ProTeam ProForce 1500XP fits on the cart with all the other supplies and works best for Aiken’s zone cleaning approach.

At night, the staff bands together as teams of specialists. There are four types of specialists on a team, the vacuum specialist, the restroom specialist, the light duty specialist, and the utility specialist. They each use highly efficient tools and are expertly trained on a few tasks.

“We’re going to see a reduction in labor costs. But our goal is not to reduce staff. We just want a standardized and efficient approach to cleaning,” says Kip Gunter, the district’s director of Maintenance and Custodial. “This consistency will lead to cleaner and healthier environments for students, enabling them to both learn and achieve more.”

proteam.emerson.com

This article originally appeared in the issue of .

Featured

  • VLK Architects Receives Caudill Award for Texas Learning Center

    VLK Architects recently received the Caudill Award for its work on the Dr. Jim F. Chadwell Administration Building and Discovery Lab Learning Center for Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD in Fort Worth, Texas, according to a news release. The award is the highest honor from the Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA) / Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) Exhibit of School Architecture yearly competition.

  • Pfluger Architects Announces Promotions of Seven Staff Members

    Texas-based architecture firm Pfluger Architects recently announced that it has promoted seven staff members to senior-level positions. One of the promotions is that of Dallas-based Senior Project Architect Chad Martin to Principal, according to a news release.

  • Addressing the Housing Affordability Crisis Through Creative Campus Development

    Many Southern California college and university campuses are living amidst surging housing costs, driving the need to house more of their populations on campus. Especially for community colleges, the need to support millions of unhoused and housing insecure students has become a prominent issue that lawmakers and institutions alike are trying to solve.

  • Zurn Elkay Announces Updated Line of Filtered Bottle Filling Stations

    Zurn Elkay Water Solutions recently released an updated line of its Elkay Filtered Bottle Filling Stations, according to a news release. The new line features a sleeker design and functional upgrades to help simplify filter maintenance and reduce long-term labor costs.