How to Grade Your School Cleaning Service

Posted on April 30, 2019

 

Is the contract with your school’s cleaning vendor up for renewal this summer? If so, now’s the right time to start assessing your school cleaning service. Evaluating your cleaning staff is a lot easier when class is still in session, so you’ll want to do your homework before the school year ends. That way, you’ll have the information you need to renew the contract or make the switch to a new vendor.

To evaluate your cleaning service, you’ll need to make a thorough inspection of your facilities. For this, we suggest taking a similar approach to the evaluation system used for our JAN-PRO® Tracker® inspections.

Under this system, we perform routine site inspections to ensure that JAN-PRO cleaners are fully compliant with our cleaning standards. During inspection, we perform a room-by-room evaluation. Each room is broken down into a checklist of important areas and key cleaning tasks. We then grade each of these areas and tasks on a numeric scale.

Getting ready for a cleaning staff evaluation? Below, we’ve compiled a helpful guide on how to create an effective school cleaning service report card.

How to Build a School Cleaning Service Report Card

Building Your Checklist

When you’re developing a report card for your school’s cleaning staff, you’ll want to cover as many distinct areas as possible. In a typical school, this means that the report card will cover the following zones, plus any other specialized rooms or areas:

  • Entryways
  • Corridors
  • Classrooms
  • Common areas
  • Restrooms
  • Gym(s)
  • Changerooms
  • Staff offices
  • Staff break rooms
  • Storage areas
  • Maintenance areas
  • Exterior walkways
  • Playgrounds
  • Recreation equipment
  • Landscaping

Once you have a complete list, build a cleaning checklist for each area. Make sure that each area’s checklist covers the key cleaning tasks that need to be performed in this area.

A basic classroom cleaning checklist might cover:

  • Floors
  • Desktops
  • Shelving
  • Vents and/or ceiling fans
  • Windows and/or mirrors
  • Waste receptacles
  • High-touch surfaces (e.g., door handles)

Notes & Comments

In addition to a detailed, room-by-room cleaning checklist, your report card should include areas for inspection notes. This will give you a space to record details that aren’t covered by your checklist grading system.

For example, let’s say you that inspect a classroom and find an area of flooring that hasn’t been properly cleaned. A section for written notes will allow you to record the location, nature, and severity of the issue for future reference.

You might also wish to include areas where you can make written comments of a more general nature. This will allow you to record a summary of your findings and your impressions for later use. It will also give you the chance to speak with other members of your staff and record their feedback and their experiences with cleaning staff.

The Grading Process

Once you’ve compiled a grading system for your school cleaning service, there’s the matter of actually putting it to use. To do so, you’ll need to address a pair of obstacles.

The first obstacle is scheduling. It takes a lot of time to perform a school cleaning service inspection, so you may need to break the evaluation down and perform it one piece at a time. At the same time, you’ll need to be mindful of the cleaning schedule. Certain cleaning tasks are only performed at scheduled times, so you’ll need to coordinate your inspection with this schedule. Otherwise, the results won’t be accurate.

The second obstacle is secrecy. You may prefer to warn your school cleaning service of upcoming inspections. But if you do so, the results will be colored by the fact that your cleaners know they’re under scrutiny. If you want an accurate sense of cleaners’ work, you’ll need to find a way to inspect their work without calling attention to your evaluation.

Unimpressed with your existing school cleaning service? Call JAN-PRO at (866) 355-1064 to get a FREE estimate and learn more about our dedicated school cleaning program.