Putnam’s New Custodial Company Working Well

Putnam County School Officials are seeing better results from the new company handling the system’s custodial duties.

Deputy Director of Schools Tim Martin said ABM Industries currently hard at work doing the cleaning that can only be done during summer break. Martin said ABM is better suited to work with the district than previous maintenance companies because they have the size and resources to do what is needed.

“We’ll find out exactly how happy we are at the end of the summer, right as school starts back,” Martin said. “Summertime is very important in cleaning as you can imagine because with kids out of school we have a lot of floors that need to be waxed.”

Martin said one of the main tasks is waxing the floors of every school building in the district. He said some staff had concerns about the company when ABM first began working, but most of the issues have gone away with time.

“I got several phone calls from employees that said, you know, we don’t have a scrubber machine at this school or we don’t have the, you know, right stuff or whatever, but those kind of things have been addressed and were taken care of pretty quickly by ABM,” Martin said.

Martin said hallways are easier to wax, but classrooms are more difficult because everything must be removed from the floor before they can start working.

“All the student desks, teacher desks, any kind of computer desks or anything like that, and if we have computers in that classroom, the computers have to be all moved out of the room and then they come in, they strip the wax, and then wax it back,” Martin said.

Martin said they also had issues when it was time for the old maintenance company to leave and ABM to begin.

“There are always transitional issues,” Martin said. “We had, you know, just issues getting the old cleaning service taking out their equipment and the new cleaning service moving in their equipment and things of that nature, but nothing out of the ordinary.”