Dear Editor,
As we look forward to the opening of the new Owego Elementary School in early January, we want to address some questions that members of the community have posed about the new building. One concern is that the larger building will have substantially greater maintenance and cleaning costs.
Throughout the design process, we worked to find materials, surfaces and systems that would make maintenance and cleaning much more efficient and cost-effective than in a traditional building. A few examples will illustrate this point.
While there is more floor space in the new school, the flooring is very different than in the old school. For example, all hallways, the cafeteria flooring and other large group instruction areas have terrazzo floors. These floors are virtually indestructible, and are cleaned with a floor scrubber, using only ionized water (with no need for cleaning chemicals).
The requirement that the floors be stripped and waxed twice each year has been eliminated, with substantial savings in both cost and manpower.
You’ll find no vinyl floors in the new building’s classrooms, so there’s no need for floor wax or floor stripper there either. Damp mopping will suffice, and they will never require refinishing. In our older buildings, the cost in manpower, chemicals, and wax to maintain the floors is high. To reiterate, in the new OES, that cost will be zero.
Additionally, there is no longer a requirement for personal protective equipment, or mops, buckets and other items that are specific to waxing and stripping, further reducing our costs and manpower. And all the cleaning chemicals we do use are safe and environmentally friendly.
Another cost-saving initiative is the new school’s rooftop filtration system, which is two times more efficient that its counterpart in the old school.
What this means is better air quality for students and faculty, but it also means far less dust being created and carried throughout the building. A cleaner building requires much less manpower and fewer cleaning products.
The new hallway locker doors’ material will not retain student handprints, requiring much less cleaning. Other surfaces throughout the building have the same smudge-resistant qualities.
While we won’t have a straightforward comparison of costs until we’ve been in the new building for a full cycle, it’s important to note that we explicitly designed it with an eye toward long-lasting materials, surfaces and systems that require very little cleaning and maintenance.
I hope this helps in understanding some of the areas of cost efficiency in our new elementary school.
Sincerely,
Stephen Jensen
Public Information Coordinator, Owego Apalachin Schools
