With students out of sight and working from home, ‘out of mind’ would be easy to accomplish as well. Instead, why not take the opportunity of these quieter weeks and prepare for your charges’ return?
COVID-19 has brought hygiene into the spotlight for all places where people gather, including schools – and that’s going to last longer than the lockdown. While children are at your school or in your campus, their safety, as much as their education, is in your hands. In this newly virus-conscious society, a large part of safety is safe hygiene.
Safeguard your school against viruses, inspections, and hygiene-aware parents with these suggestions for school life in the new normal!
1. Make sure your facilities are clean and safe for social distancing:
- Ensure that each staff member and student has 4 metres square of personal space.
- Use safe and TGA listed sanitising sprays to clean common use areas such as large tables, cafeteria areas, lockers or storage areas, and staff desks.
2. Explain the pandemic to your students, and enlist their help:
- Reduce contact between students as much as possible – encourage each student to keep their distance when working and playing.
- Encourage Students to consider their head/face as a ‘No Touch Zone’ when in the classroom.
- Encourage Hand Washing in every student break.
- Avoid sharing personal stationary items such as glu-sticks, scissors, pens, rulers pencils – anything that is held in a students hand becomes a potential virus carrier! To help with this one, you could make up ‘special packs’ for each student of essential items that shouldn’t be shared.
- Educate students as to ‘Sneeze and Nose Blowing Etiquette’ – Post our Etiquette Poster in classrooms and common areas.
3. Make sure you have the required hygiene provisions to handle daily interactions:
- Where possible, make hand sanitizer available in lobbies and classroom entries.
- Future-proof your hygiene systems for an outbreak – hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Talk to an infection control expert to make sure your hygiene systems can sustain an outbreak of any infection, from COVID-19 and the flu, to measles and chicken pox.
Find our Hygiene Checklist below, for a quick and easy guide to safer classrooms:
[pdf-embedder url=”http://veridia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Hygiene-Checklist.pdf” title=”Hygiene Checklist”]
