Staying clean and healthy

WHEN you throw hundreds to thousands of children and teenagers together for about five to six hours, chances are some of them are going to come home in a less-than-immaculate state.

Put them in an environment where they outnumber the adults by 30-50 to one, and the odds are there will be a mess somewhere in that place.

The mess may be accidental or deliberate, but at the end of the day, someone still needs to clean it up.

So, who are the ones we rely on to push up their sleeves and break out the brooms when it comes to the cleanliness of our schools?

Washing hands with soap before eating and after going to the toilet is an important step in disease control, especially when students use common facilities in school.

For national schools, the job is done by privatised workers.

The number of workers allocated to each school is dependent on the size of the school.

For example, a school like SMK Seafield in Subang Jaya, which has an enrolment of about 2,500 students, has six workers.

Three are assigned to outdoor duties, including the gardening and general cleanliness of the school compound; while the other three maintain the cleanliness of the school toilets and corridors, as part of their indoor duties.

Some schools have procured equipment to monitor the temperature of their students as a precautionary measure to prevent the spread of the influenza A(H1N1) virus.

As outdoor jobs are generally heavy tasks, these duties are usually assigned to the male workers.

Cutting the grass, touching up paint jobs, clearing clogged drains and moving furniture are all part of the day’s work for these hands.

However, those in charge of the toilets might argue that they have the tougher assignment.

School toilets, like most public toilets in the country, unfortunately do not generally have a good reputation for cleanliness.

Some students in fact, would rather just “hold it in” until they get home, rather than visit the school toilet due to their dirty and smelly reputation.

From the dirt tracked in with dirty shoes to leftover “deposits” in the toilet bowl, it is oftentimes a tough battle keeping the toilet as clean as it should be. Even when the toilets are cleaned four to five times daily, as is the case in SMK Seafield.

Meanwhile, the cleanliness of the classrooms becomes the responsibility of the students themselves.

This usually involves the class representative in charge of cleanliness drawing up a roster where each student takes turns to do different duties during the week.

These duties usually include sweeping the floor, cleaning the blackboard after each lesson and wiping the window panes among other chores.

Toilets are often the most challenging part of the school to keep clean

Precautionary measures

Because school involves putting so many people together in close proximity, it is a good place for diseases to spread.

The use of common facilities like the canteen, classes and toilets, makes it easier for diseases that spread by air or water to infect a larger number of people.

While the usual suspects in school illnesses are the seasonal influenza cases, food poisoning and dengue fever, the current influenza A(H1N1) has raised the awareness of contagious diseases to a new level.

With three students having come down with the virus last month, SMK Seafield is certainly taking no chances with a recurrence of the illness.

Aside from monitoring the cleanliness of the school and ensuring that the toilets are always supplied with soap, principal Teh Seok Im has taken a few other precautionary measures.

“Even before the cases in July, I obtained two Thermofocus devices to take the temperatures of the students.

“And I went onto the Net to find out more information about the virus when the first cases (in the country) were announced,” she shares.

Students who feel unwell can get their temperature scanned at the office, and are told to go home if they have a fever.

These students, as well as the staff members who interact with them, are provided with face masks and hand sanitisers at the school’s expense to help contain the spread of the disease.

The same goes for teachers who are unwell. “I also ask teachers to keep away if they are sick,” says Teh.

As trial exams for the PMR and SPM are going on around this time, the school has decided to practise a closed exam system. This means that students are not allowed to take the exam papers home with them.

This is to ensure that those who are sick or quarantined at home during the exam period can take the same papers at a later time.

“It’s a lot of trouble, having to collect all the papers back and storing them safely, but we have to do it for the students on MC (medical leave) or who are quarantined,” says Teh.

Other precautionary measures include encouraging students and staff to practise social distancing.

“I told my students, ‘No hugging and shaking hands. We can practise the arigato (thank you in Japanese) culture — just bow a little and greet each other, and try to keep about three feet apart.’”

Assemblies have also been cancelled during this period, and Teh advises her students during her daily briefings to stay at home and interact online through social networking sites, rather than hanging out in crowded shopping malls.

However, she is concerned about the tuition centres her students attend.

“No one is monitoring the tuition centres. At least in school, most of the time we know what to do.

“In the tuition centres, you have students from all the different schools in the area. If the virus spreads from there, the exposure rate to all the schools is so high.”

With all the measures that have been taken, Teh is quite proud to say that there have been no more cases of A(H1N1) flu in her school since last month.

The three Form Four students confirmed to have the influenza A(H1N1) virus from the school, were home quarantined for a week last month and have fully recovered since then.