Know

Have you ever gone to a restaurant and sat down at a sticky table or found dried food on your fork? Have you ever hesitated about picking up a pen at the bank or grocery store because the person in front of you had a cold? Have you ever put a public toilet seat down with your foot just to avoid touching it?

Most people have experienced uncomfortable and stressful health-related situations. As adults, we can respond to such situations by visiting a different shop or restaurant or by washing our hands as soon as we leave the bank or grocery store. We want to stay healthy, and we want to believe that our environments are reasonably clean. Children and their families have these same desires. Child development and school-age programs must provide environments that are clean and prevent the spread of infectious diseases. It is your responsibility to make sure children have a safe and healthy environment for play and learning.

Maintaining A Clean Environment

As a Program Manager, it is your responsibility to ensure that your program’s environment is always clean. When it comes to keeping a clean environment, there are tasks that should happen daily, weekly, and monthly. Teach staff how to use required cleaning checklists and follow up to make sure tasks are completed. Cleaning needs to happen every day, but it also cannot distract staff from supervising children and youth. Work with staff to create plans for cleaning that address the need to maintain supervision of children and youth.

Cleaning, Sanitizing, and Disinfecting

Knowing whether to clean, sanitize, or disinfect is critical, and doing it correctly is essential. Here are the differences:

• Cleaning: Removes dirt or debris from a surface. For example, you spray a table with a mix of water and soap and scrub the table to remove food products and debris after a meal.
• Sanitizing: Reduces germs on a surface. Sanitizing products usually are not effective unless the surface has been cleaned first. After cleaning the table with soap and water, spray an approved sanitizing solution to kill germs. A sanitizer may be appropriate to use on food-contact surfaces (dishes, utensils, cutting boards, high chair trays), toys that children may place in their mouths, and pacifiers. Sanitizing solution should not be sprayed when children and youth are seated at the table.
• Disinfecting: Uses a product that will destroy most germs on a surface, but not bacterial spores. Disinfecting a surface is often necessary when it has made contact with body fluids. Disinfecting usually requires a stronger approved solution. Disinfecting may be appropriate on non-porous surfaces, such as diaper-changing tables, countertops, door and cabinet handles, and toilets and other bathroom surfaces.

How Diseases Are Spread

Understanding how diseases are spread can assist you and your staff in efforts to decrease their transmission. Here is a quick refresher on infectious diseases. Infectious diseases are caused by germs — such as bacteria, viruses, fungi or parasites. The germs that cause infectious disease, such as bacteria and viruses, cannot be seen by the naked eye. Infectious diseases can spread from one person to another in a number of ways:

• Direct contact: Direct contact with someone who is sick, such as hugging or shaking hands
• Indirect contact: Touching something that has germs on it, such as a door handle or a toy that someone who is sick has touched
• Through the air: Spread through breathing in germs when someone sneezes or coughs
• Fecal transmission: Spread to a person’s mouth via hands soiled with feces that touch food, surfaces or objects
• Blood infections: Spread when blood or other body fluids enter the bloodstream of another person

Infectious Disease Prevention

The transmission of disease can be greatly reduced by using the following precautions:

• Frequent handwashing
• Maintain a clean and sanitary environment
• Maintain current vaccination records
• Follow proper hygiene (cover coughs with your elbow, wash hands after blowing your nose, etc.)
• Conduct daily health checks
• Enforce the exclusion of infected children, youth, and adults
• Promote healthy habits

Supervise & Support

You and the trainers or coaches in your program play an important role in keeping children and youth healthy. For new staff members, it is important that you:

• Train staff to use products your program uses to clean, sanitize, or disinfect. You must ensure staff members know where cleaning supplies are located, how to mix solutions, when to use them, and how to use them. All supplies should be approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to make sure they are safe.
• Show staff members how cleaning supplies are stored in your program. For example, cleaning materials should be stored in clearly marked containers. They must be secured and inaccessible to children, including school-age children.
• Make sure staff members know how to follow ratios when preparing cleaning, sanitizing, or disinfecting solutions. Teach staff when fresh solutions need to be made. Make sure fresh solutions are prepared each day and labeled with the date. Talk with staff about roles and responsibilities in the program: who makes the solution each day?
• You may also need to provide staff members with calendars and tools to help them keep their environments healthy. Local Service policies will dictate your cleaning schedules. For infant and toddler classrooms, it is especially important to provide boxes or bins for “soiled toys” (e.g., toys that have been in children’s mouths that need to be sanitized). For all other settings, it is helpful to provide checklists or work with staff to create calendars. These tools can help staff remember when various surfaces were last cleaned.

Divide Tasks to Distribute Labor

It’s important that staff are aware of their cleaning responsibilities, both as individuals and as members of the program team. Maintaining a clean environment cannot be the sole responsibility of one person. Classroom teams should divide tasks equally, alternating who does what on a regular basis to keep hard feelings to a minimum. If hard feelings develop because one person feels they are doing an unfair amount of work, especially when it comes to cleaning, it can damage their relationship as a teaching team.

A posted schedule for the cleaning of shared spaces should be utilized to ensure that cleaning tasks are equally shared by everyone who uses the space. For example, in an indoor large muscle area, every class would pick up after they use the space; the assigned class for that week would be responsible for wiping down all the equipment.

One final note when it comes to maintaining a clean environment—do not wait until it is time for an inspection to do a deep clean. Deep cleanings should occur at least quarterly, if not monthly. This is similar to the concept of preparing a large meal; it is easier to clean up as you go along instead of waiting to do it all at the end.

Management Practices That Support the Prevention of Infectious Disease

The chart below summarizes your key responsibilities when it comes to ensuring staff maintain a clean and healthy environment.

Maintaining a clean environment is one of the most effective strategies you can use to decrease the transmission of infectious disease. Taking a systematic approach and supporting your staff to do the same is an important aspect of your job. Make sure staff know their cleaning responsibilities and have the necessary tools to complete them. When there are performance concerns, address them immediately and consistently.

The video below shows how programs maintain a clean and healthy environment.

Completing This Course

For more information on what to expect in this course and a list of the accompanying Learn, Explore and Apply resources and activities offered throughout the lessons, visit the Management Healthy Environments Course Guide.

To support the professional development of the direct care staff members or family child care providers you oversee, you can access their corresponding Course Guides:

• Infant & Toddler Healthy Environments Course Guide
• Preschool Healthy Environments Course Guide
• School-Age Healthy Environments Course Guide
• Family Child Care Healthy Environments Course Guide