Back to School? Top Restroom Resources for Facility Managers

There has never been a back-to-school season like this one.

The COVID-19 pandemic is presenting facility managers with water-related challenges they’ve probably never seen before—along with new opportunities for improvement.

Welcoming students back? Your facilities have likely been closed for far longer than usual, and you will need to flush out your buildings’ water systems to reduce serious safety risks.

Teaching remotely this fall? You now have an extended window to upgrade your restrooms’ water usage, sustainability, and hygiene.

Here’s a small library of Sloan resources to help you do right by your students, your faculty, and your staff during this unprecedented year.

An Essential White Paper for Re-opening Schools

We created the Sloan Building Commissioning Guide earlier this year in response to the pandemic, which forced facilities such as schools to be closed for much longer periods than usual.

This free white paper outlines specific procedures for properly flushing out a buildings’ water systems to reduce the serious safety risks associated with prolonged system inactivity.

Water that sits in plumbing lines for extended periods of time becomes stagnant. It can have a bad taste, unpleasant odor, debris, or elevated levels of lead and copper. More troubling, it may have lost all or most of its residual disinfectant, which can lead to elevated levels of bacteria and other pathogens such as Legionella or Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

If you are re-opening your school, please download this free white paper to learn how to better protect the health of your students and teachers when they return.

The Hygienic Benefits of Touch-free Restrooms

The pandemic has made people far more alert to the importance of hygiene. And, as many school districts and building managers have come to realize, hands-free, sensor-operated commercial restroom fixtures are much more hygienic than manual ones. Eliminating or reducing the number of restroom surfaces that students touch reduces the spread of disease-causing germs.

These resources can help you upgrade your school’s restrooms with hygienic, touch-free fixtures:

• The Sloan Guide to Touch-free Restrooms. A complete guide to Sloan’s touch-free flushometers, flushometer retrofits, faucets, soap dispensers, and hand dryers.
• The Retrofit Flushometers Brochure. Retrofit flushometers may only take a few minutes to install, and they can greatly improve the hygiene in your commercial restroom while saving water, time, and money.
• The BASYS® Guided Handwashing Faucet. Guides kids (and adults) through the right way to wash their hands. The readout on its crown gives users clear instructions through the five steps of correct handwashing as recommended by the CDC.

Expertise in Durability, Hygiene, and Sustainability

Sloan is one of the world’s leading suppliers of restroom products for schools large and small. When it’s time to upgrade the restrooms in your district, we have the resources to give you an edge in durability, hygiene, and sustainability.

• Sustainability 101: How to Build a Truly Eco-friendly School. Building sustainable schools helps create more environmentally aware adults. This infographic explores ideas for building schools that protect the environment today and lay the foundation for the next generation.
• Specifying Plumbing Fixtures for K-12 and Higher Education Facilities. This CEU course enables architects, designers, and engineers to evaluate and prioritize all the key factors in school restroom design.
• Corning-Painted Post Area School District Case Study. Sloan helped this district, which was combining two high schools into one, build restrooms that made a strong visual impression while saving water and energy.
• University of Notre Dame Case Study. Notre Dame and Sloan have a 112-year relationship, so it was only natural that Sloan products were designated as the Basis of Design for the Campus Crossroads Project, the largest building initiative in the school’s history.

Make this challenging year an opportunity to improve the hygiene and sustainability of your schools’ restrooms—talk to Sloan!