Students often criticize the cleaning done on campus but don’t always know what goes on behind the scenes.
Since April of 2008, Capital has contracted out cleaning services to Aetna Integrated Services, a facility services company based in Columbus.
There are 36 full-time members of the custodial staff, plus one Batelle attendant, and one Campus Center attendant. There are also five staff members at the Capital University Law School. The staff is required to clean all of the housing and academic buildings on campus, as well as the student union, campus center, and administrative buildings.
The restrooms and showers in the residence halls, specifically Lohman, Saylor-Ackerman, Schaff, and Cotterman, are cleaned daily. The bathrooms in the suites in College Avenue are cleaned once per week, and the unisex bathrooms are cleaned daily.
“The biggest issue is the bathrooms,” Ryan Brun, sophomore, said. “We went about a week without toilet paper in the stalls [in my hall]. Sometimes the soap isn’t changed, we had a [shower] drain blockage, and one of the showers didn’t even work for half the semester.”
Brun said he has noticed problems in only his hall and that the rest of campus is clean, except for the occasional trash overflow on the weekends.
Each of the buildings has specific cleaning schedules and inspection sheets. Residence hall lobbies, entrance doors, lounges, laundry rooms, stairwells, and hallways are spot-cleaned daily and fully cleaned once a week, with one female and one male employee being assigned to each of the five halls.
Academic and administrative buildings are cleaned daily between 4:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. The restrooms in the conservatory and Blackmore Library are cleaned twice a day. Vacuuming is done daily and dusting is done weekly.
On the weekends, there are only two custodial staff members on campus. They make rounds through the bathrooms to clean up any major messes and make sure the bathrooms are stocked.
Another concern students have is with the cleaning schedule.
“The timing isn’t always great … it’s usually when most people start getting up and going to classes,” Leif Nielson, sophomore, said. He suggests posting the cleaning schedule in the bathroom, saying this would be “…very helpful so the students could plan around them doing their job.”
Aetna and facilities management are looking for student input in order to improve.
“Even though we are in the buildings every day, sometimes we may miss something, and that’s normal,” said Rima Leonaviciute, Assistant Branch Manager for Aetna Integration Services. “We want to make sure that the response would be quick, [and] that the issue would not create another issue.”
There are several ways to alert facilities management of any cleaning or maintenance concerns. Students can communicate with their hall’s residence assistant, who submit weekly housekeeping reports to Facilities Management.
Alternatively, students can report problems to facilities by calling their office or submitting an online work order at myschoolbuilding.com
