Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google

District Goes Cordless for Speed and Safety

  • 10/01/18
cordless backpack vacuum

Blue Valley School District was able to eliminate cordrelated safety hazards, increase environmental cleanliness and cut cleaning time nearly in half with ProTeam cordless backpack vacuums.

“It’s just like the name, GoFree; you can go anywhere with it,” says Matthew Brooks, custodial coordinator for Blue Valley School District, one of the major school districts in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area. The district recently implemented the ProTeam GoFree Flex Pro cordless backpack vacuum to reduce vacuuming time and improve safety.

The district’s 50-plus facilities span 4.4 million square feet of space. Some of the older buildings have limited outlets making it difficult for Brooks’ staff to vacuum the buildings, and he found custodians taking risks to get the job done.

When a custodian cleans with the Go-Free Flex Pro cordless backpack vacuum, cord-related risks are eliminated and cleaning is significantly faster.

Vacuuming used to take three hours for 18 to 20 classrooms, including hallways. The cordless backpack vacuum reduced that to two hours. Since the staff has been using the GoFree, the time-savings is approaching 40 percent.

The time saved from using cordless backpack vacuums has gone to dusting, spot cleaning carpets and sanitizing desktops daily rather than every other day. The custodians also switched from rags to backpack vacuums for dusting. According to Brooks, backpacks are more effective at capturing dust.

The reallocation of time to improve cleaning has had measurable results. One school was hovering around a 2.5 on the APPA scale (one is the highest standard of cleanliness and five is the lowest). Implementing the cordless backpack vacuums improved the school’s score to 2.0.

“If you’re not maintaining your building so your students have a safe and clean environment, it hurts their ability to learn,” says Brooks.

proteam.emerson.com

This article originally appeared in the School Planning & Management October 2018 issue of Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • Year-Round Schools Require Year-Round Indoor Air Quality Planning

    While many schools are out for the summer, year-round schools follow a more “balanced” schedule with shorter, more frequent breaks spaced throughout the school year. Even though this offers educational benefits, these facilities have less downtime for building maintenance. This can become an issue when facilities managers overlook the importance of routine HVAC maintenance and air duct cleaning services.

  • 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.

  • Auburn University Debuts $224M STEM + Agricultural Sciences Complex

    Auburn University in Auburn, Ala., recently opened its new $224-million STEM + Agricultural Sciences Complex, the largest research construction project in the university’s history, according to university news. The facility measures more than 265,000 square feet and brings six departments from the College of Agriculture and College of Sciences and Mathematics together under one roof.

  • ZeroEyes, Academic Innovators Partner to Provide Safety Solutions

    ZeroEyes, which produces a multi-analytics weapons detection and threat intelligence platform, recently announced a partnership with Academic Innovators, according to a news release.