How to Keep Your School Clean Amidst COVID-19

As schools reopen, it’s important that precautions are taken both inside and outside the classroom to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

It is important to keep your school clean at all times. However, with COVID-19 present, we need to be more vigilant and find new ways to keep our vicinity cleaner and safer for our community.

Firstly, we highly encourage schools to be well-informed about COVID-19 and how it spreads. This is one way we can protect ourselves and others. Teach your students the importance of following rules and abiding by them through classroom procedures and protocols.

Take note of your students’ concerns and ideas. Answer their questions in an age-appropriate manner. Younger students tend to have different reactions so it is important to acknowledge them.

This is vital for protecting the wellbeing of students, teachers, and administrators, as well as their families and the wider community.

Here are some of the common ones you can start with:

• Maintain a distance of at least 1-metre between everyone present at school
• Implement staggered recess breaks
• Avoid big groups and limit after-school activities
• Have a different check-in and out time for students and teachers
• Use signs, ground markings, tape, barriers and other means to maintain a 1-metre distance around the school
• Have outdoor lessons outdoors more frequently

Humans are creatures of habit so we recommend schools to create a dos and don’ts list so that students and teachers can refer to. This will keep everything in order and make it easier for you to switch to new guidelines if needed.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has released an easy-to-follow checklist here on what and when to clean and disinfect.

To make it more interesting for your students, you can try the following methods:

• Organise creative and fun activities and rules with your students to teach them on avoiding high-risk and high-touch areas in classrooms and their surroundings e.g. not touching the railing while walking up and down the stairs, or keeping classroom doors open to avoid touching door-knobs
• Incorporate rules into lessons so that your students can easily remember them
• Create fun posters that can be hung around the school to remind others to stick to the sanitation rules.

If your staff and students are required to wear fabric masks, ensure that everyone is familiar with when and how they should wear masks and how to dispose of used masks safely.

It is important to take note that all efforts should be made to ensure the use of a mask does not interfere with learning. No child should be denied access to education because of mask wearing or the lack of a mask because of low resources or unavailability.

Here are some tips and tricks:

• Teach your students to sing a song while washing their hands (this will teach them how long and how you should be washing your hands)
• Set a time for students to wash or sanitise their hands throughout the day
• Physically demonstrate how to wash your hands for students to follow

Using LittleLives, schools can do the following:

• Streamline all your communications with your parents in one single platform using LittleLives’ Communications
• Share important announcements and updates via the Bulletin feature
• Conduct surveys with your parents on your school’s health and safety procedures

This article was first published on LittleLives.

Written By BRYAN KOH