The Kamloops-Thompson School Board is hiring more custodial staff to help meet new COVID-19 cleaning standards.

SD73 Board Chair Kathleen Karpuk says it needs additional staff to cover high contact surface cleaning that’s required. “The board authorized our administration to hire an additional 17 custodial positions in order to have the daytime cleaning so that we can make sure that all of our students and all of our staff are safe for when they return to school next week.”

“According to the the guidelines that have been posted by the Ministry and WorkSafeBC we need increased contact cleaning and so the custodial staff will be following those guidelines to make sure that we’re in compliance with that and make sure that our staff and students are safe when we have return to school.”

Karpuk says it has had increased cleaning in schools for the past number of weeks and it has had some of its bus drivers coming in to do that. “Because our bus runs had obviously been cancelled, because we’re not bringing students into schools, we did ask if some of our bus drivers were interested in getting training to do some of the cleaning and they indicated that some of them were interested. And so we have had some of the bus drivers in doing extra cleaning.”

“What we’ve realized is that as those bus drivers need to go back to driving buses, to bring students into schools, we now need to have additional custodial staff to do that high contacts surface cleaning that’s required.”

The additional positions will cost the board just over $1 million.