Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google

Breaking the Cycle of Norovirus Transmission

  • 11/01/17
Flu virus

The flu, strep and norovirus are all serious illnesses that can quadruple student absence rates. Routine hygiene and disinfection can help to mitigate the threat that these illnesses pose. ABM helps to promote better hygiene standards and cleaner schools to cut down on absences and create a safer learning environment.

How do you fight a triple threat of flu, strep, and norovirus that quadruples student absence rates? With a team of custodians empowered with the resources and training needed to quickly and safely enact protocols to protect learning spaces.

Hamilton County Department of Education is home to 79 schools and over 40,000 students. When monitoring triggered attention to dramatically increasing absences across the district, custodians stepped up to the next level of our disinfection process. Once ten schools showed 60 or more students out per day, a district-wide campaign was initiated to break the cycle of transmission.

Multiple disinfection methods were dialed up. Every surface in every school was fogged with an electrostatic disinfectant. Each restroom was pressure washed with disinfecting foam every night. Thorough and repeated attention to surfaces throughout each school shut down infection vectors, but that was only half the story.

Routine hygiene is also key to controlling outbreaks by shutting down person-to-person transmission, so ABM supplied extra hand sanitizers and paper towels to help school nurses and district leaders support regular hand washing.

After one of the hardest hit elementary schools saw 100 students absent over just five days, our custodian’s campaign to control the virus outbreak brought that school’s absence rate down to 15 after just one week. District-wide, one week after our custodian’s first initiative, the student absence rate for Hamilton County Schools had returned to pre-outbreak levels.

info.abm.com/School-Planning-Norovirus-LP.html

This article originally appeared in the issue of .

Featured

  • Rethinking K-12 Schools as a Continuous Learning Experience

    Most students move through three or more separate facilities during their K-12 journey, yet the built environments they encounter at each stage have traditionally been designed in isolation, with little continuity in spatial language, learning philosophy, or physical resources. Each new school is a reset with different layouts, learning models, expectations, and ways of moving through a building. The next generation of school design is making the case that the first day of kindergarten and the last day of high school can and should feel connected through common support systems and infrastructure in the physical environment.

  • Planning with Clarity: Using AI to Make Better Campus Decisions, Not Just Better Designs

    Higher education leaders are being asked to make increasingly high-stakes decisions about campus facilities amid greater uncertainty than ever before. Social and economic pressures, shifting enrollment, and evolving learning models compete with growing deferred maintenance needs to strain even the most robust infrastructure budgets.

  • Virginia Tech Tops Out New College of Engineering Building

    Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., recently celebrated the topping out of Mitchell Hall, which will soon stand as the largest College of Engineering building on campus, according to a news release. The university partnered with Skanska on the 285,500-square-foot facility, which has an expected completion date of winter 2028.

  • Children walking along bright school corridor with motion blur

    How Next-Gen Design Is Reshaping the Student Experience

    The environments where students learn play a crucial role in shaping their growth in and out of the classroom. By centering design on well-being, flexibility, and purpose, districts can ensure their facilities remain vibrant community assets for many years to come.