Cleaning and promoting hand hygiene are important everyday actions schools can take to slow the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases and protect students and staff.

Cleaning with products containing soap or detergent reduces germs on surfaces and objects by removing contaminants and may also weaken or damage some of the virus particles, which decreases risk of infection from surfaces. Cleaning high touch surfaces and shared objects once a day is usually enough to sufficiently remove virus that may be on surfaces. Plan with staff and teachers.

Discuss obstacles to routine cleaning and ways to overcome those obstacles. Here are some tips on what places to disinfect for the safety of your children:

• Clean high touch surfaces and objects (such as, door handles, sink handles, drinking fountains) within the school and on school transport vehicles (such as, buses).
• Limit sharing of high touch objects that are difficult to regularly clean (such as, electronic devices, pens, pencils, books, games, art supplies, lab equipment).
• If certain conditions apply (such as, low mask usage or high community transmission), do not use difficult-to-clean shared objects for 72 hours.
• If items need to be reused within 24 hours they should be disinfected.
• Regularly (at least once a day or as often as needed) clean surfaces using soap or detergent from your home. -If choosing to disinfect, ensure safe and correct use and storage of cleaning products.
• Use gloves when removing garbage bags or handling and disposing trash.
• Wash hands after removing gloves. When using hand sanitizer, apply the product to the palm of one hand (read the label to learn the correct amount) and rub the product all over the surfaces of your hands until your hands are dry.

Soap and water remove all types of germs from hands, while sanitizer acts by killing certain germs on the skin. Although alcohol-based hand sanitizers can quickly reduce the number of germs in many situations, they should be used in the right situations.