County Office Facility Planner Update – April 2020
Topics covered in this month’s update include:
Today, the State Allocation Board held a regular meeting to conduct routine business. The appeal from Lompoc Unified (Santa Barbara) was removed from the agenda. The Board then reconvened into an emergency meeting to consider granting additional authority to the Executive Director in response to the ongoing public health emergency.
During the evening of March 19, 2020 Governor Newsom issued Executive Order No. N-33-20, which ordered all Californians to “stay at home,” with certain exemptions for essential services and critical infrastructure projects. This Order has prompted questions and caused some high level of new angst https://covid19.ca.gov/img/Executive-Order-N-33-20.pdf. The question we explore in this memorandum is:
Does Governor Newsom’s Executive Order No. N-33-20 include and thus impact K-12 public school construction projects that are in progress or about to commence?
Courtesy of CASH Maintenance Network
Healthy Schools Act (HSA):
Use of Disinfectant Wipes, Hand Sanitizers and Antibacterial Soap
The spread of COVID-19 is significantly affecting all of us, including the K-12 education community in California. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the State of California, and the State Department of Education (CDE) are all good resources for timely and empirical information about COVID-19 and K-12 schools.
From a more practical standpoint concerning school facilities and maintenance, there have been questions about the use of disinfecting wipes/spray and hand sanitizers and antibacterial soaps under the Health Schools Act (HSA), which has been administered by the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) since 2000; specifically, is HSA training required use the sanitizers outlined above? As of today, the HSA specifies the following:
HSA training can be done online on the DPR website free of charge, a change to the HSA that the CASH Maintenance Network recommended to ensure that the training does not require leaving your school site. For your reference on this issue, click here for information from the DPR on using hand sanitizers, click here for using disinfectants at schools and childcare facilities, and click here for an overview of the Healthy Schools Act (which includes how you can register for training).
We are in contact with the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) and the Department of Education (CDE), and will let you know of any changes that may affect this guidance. The following is a link to the CDE website which is an excellent resource on issues related to COVID-19 in a K-12 school environment:
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/he/hn/coronavirus.asp
–Ian Padilla
County Office Facility Planner Update – March 2020
Topics covered in this month’s update include: