October 2025 eNews – Back-to-School Checklist for Child Care Providers; Neuro-Inclusive Design Training Now Available: CELP-Approved for PD Hours

Regularly conducting maintenance tasks is essential to preventing costly repairs in the future. In addition, cleaning and sanitizing your spaces is important to the health of children and staff at your facility, especially as we enter respiratory illness season. The back-to-school season is a great time to make sure you are keeping up with these items!

Maintenance Reminders

• Inspect outdoor safety surfacing. Properly maintaining your safety surfacing is essential to protecting children from injury. Ensure that surfacing depth is sufficient. Replenish mulch, rake sand, and repair poured-in-place and rubber tile surfacing as needed.
• Inspect indoor and outdoor furnishings and equipment. Check toys, play structures, furnishings, and other items for damage and wear. Especially as it gets darker earlier in the autumn, make sure all indoor and outdoor lighting is working. Repair or replace items as necessary.
• Inspect windows and doorways. Look for any gaps, cracks, or damaged/worn caulk and weather stripping. Replace as necessary.
• Change Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) filters and clean vents. As the temperature outside drops, it is important to make sure your air filter has been replaced recently and that vents are clean and clear. This helps to maintain a healthy air quality inside your facility and can lower cooling and heating costs.
• Check all smoke and carbon monoxide (CO) detectors. Check the batteries and expiration dates. Yes, your detectors do expire! Typically, smoke detectors last about ten years and CO detectors for about six.
• Trim trees, hedges, and grass as necessary for visibility and safety. 

Cleaning & Sanitizing Reminders

• Replace old cleaning tools. As needed, make sure any worn, broken, or dirty mop heads, brooms, vacuums, and similar tools are repaired or replaced.
• Deep clean flooring. Disinfect any carpeted areas and rugs, and strip and wax hard flooring. Buff and polish floors as needed.
• Wash interior and exterior windows. To maintain a neat appearance and clean up fingerprints, dust, and other grime, wash both sides of interior and exterior windows.
• Refill classroom cleaning supplies as needed. Make sure your providers have what they need to maintain a healthy environment.
• Disinfect classrooms. While disinfecting toys and surfaces should be a frequent task, some areas are forgotten easily. Ensure that areas under furniture, behind shelves, in storage closets, and other low-touch areas have been disinfected in addition to high-touch areas.