Is your enrollment number looking dangerously low? Is your district making you consider shutting down schools? You’re not alone. However, the key to winning back students may be simpler than you think.

Schools that prioritize the health and wellness of students become more appealing to families. As institutions battle against growing absenteeism rates and diminishing overall enrollment rates, those that consider the infrastructure as the vehicle to deliver quality education — and take steps to provide such an environment — will far exceed those that do not.

Across the board, schools must “win back students” and “cleanliness” can help you achieve that.

‍1. Goal: More students in school, achieving success, more often.

Understanding that the common consensus deems school as important — that, in my mind, is inarguable. The reasons vary for why parents and students will choose to attend a certain school, but facilities play a massive role. 

Specifically in the higher education space, two-thirds of students consider the quality of campus to be a significant factor in their decision process with “a pleasant and attractive campus” almost always being a top-5 factor in the decision. Similar can be said for parents’ decisions when looking at K-12 institutions. Inherently that creates a very competitive environment where facilities can give the edge.

‍How can we foster student success?

In a previous article: The Frictions of Work Orders, I discussed how facilities directly affect recruiting, retention, and academic success at higher ed institutions. The results provide the only possible conclusion: facilities can be leveraged as an asset for academic institutions or can be a hindrance of student success long term. 

That said, the metric of accomplishment for institutions should never just be to get as many bodies in the buildings / on campus as possible. Student success hinges on creating a conducive learning environment with top-tier instructors (i.e. the difference between a place students go v.s. a place where students go to learn).

In the pursuit of “winning back students,” schools must also win over teachers and retain the best talent. However, recruiting and retaining teachers has become increasingly difficult, due in part to the quality of facilities — 40% of teachers would consider leaving an institution if quality graded below a C and 30% would consider leaving the industry entirely. In turn, student success waivers under the pressure of teacher turnover.

‍2. Goal: Consider health as the institution’s guiding factor.

Beyond just getting students into the door, everything else is nebulous if you cannot keep them there. Let’s face it, missing school because of illness decreases achievement — and students get sick.

Throwing your hands up in the air and saying, ‘Whatever, students get sick. We can’t control that,’ is the mentality that fails students because health and wellness can be controllable (to an extent) when proper steps are taken to value it.

In fact, a 2022 study conducted by Shaughnessy, et. al. examined 34 K-8 schools from a school district in the Southwestern US to determine the connection between desk cleaning quality and student absences due to illness. The metric tested for cleanliness was adenosine triphosphate (ATP) — the “measure of biological activity used as a marker for the pollutant loads of biological origin and overall cleanliness.”

By separating the schools evenly into “control” and “intervention” schools (i.e. the schools using enhanced tracking and cleaning measures), the study found that intervention schools had significantly lower lgATP than control (5.02 vs. 5.26, p < 0.001).

Even within the intervention schools only 24% were considered to reach a "reasonable" ATP benchmark post-cleaning (improved from 10% in control schools), but that small difference still greatly reduced gastrointestinal-illness absences by about one less per 200 students weekly.

Beyond desk cleaning, studies have shown that clean air quality also has a sustained impact on student performance. Sticking with the trend of health related attendance, absenteeism rates at large can drop by 12-55% when initiatives are taken to reduce respiratory infections and asthma triggers. 

Los Angeles schools actually saw air purification leading to improved test scores in math (0.20 standard deviations) and English (0.10 standard deviations). The jump was as effective as what could be expected if class sizes were reduced by a third.

Sure, students will get sick and periodically miss school, but the schools that attract students and families are the ones that are proactive in counteracting pathogens and germs. Shaughnessy, et. al. showed that taking steps to track what’s being cleaned and to specific metric, in turn, can lead to few illness-related absences by reducing exposure.

‍Goal 3: Take the steps that make a difference.

To reiterate what has been discussed, we know the following:

• Schools are under continuous pressure to “win back students”
• Absenteeism and declining enrollment cause lasting negative impacts on school systems
• Students, parents, and teachers put high importance on facility quality
• Increased attention to cleaning standards and air quality can limit absences and improve test scoring

As it becomes increasingly more difficult to attract and retain quality students and families have more-and-more options for education, schools must leverage facilities. So now ask yourself, where do your facilities operations land compared to above? And is there a way you can turn your operations into a marketing vehicle? I’m certain your CFO would be thrilled to work with you to figure out if this is possible.