LINDEN, NJ — Linden Public Schools are preparing to be armed and ready to keep students safe when they return to the classroom, according to a July 23 press release.
Supervisor of Buildings and Grounds Lawrence Miranda ran down the list of supplies the district has stocked up on to make sure schools are sanitized and that students and staff are well-supplied to meet the challenge of COVID-19, whenever in-person classes resume.
Miranda said he began ordering the extra supplies as soon as the district closed its schools in March.
“I jumped right on it,” he said. “And it’s a good thing I did, because otherwise we wouldn’t have had them.”
The following are the supplies amassed by the school district:
• 400 wall-mounted sanitizer dispensing stations to be installed in the schools “in very strategic locations,” according to Miranda.
• 1,200 1-gallon pump bottles of liquid hand sanitizer, which is enough for one in each classroom in the district, with a large surplus to remain in the warehouse.
• 2,800 containers of Clorox disinfecting wipes for use in classrooms.
• 250 noncontact infrared forehead thermometers to be distributed to schools.
• 600,000 disposable face masks. “That number, assuming one mask per student per day, gets us from Sept. 1 to Dec. 31,” Miranda said. “I don’t know that we’ll need that many, because I envision a lot of students will bring their own mask — same with staff. So I think 600,000 is more than enough.”
• 4,800 8-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer to be used in offices throughout the district.
• 25 Minuteman misting disinfectant sprayers with Micro-Chem Plus disinfectant detergent. “There is a wand on it, and custodians will go around and spray on desktops, lockers, doors, you name it,” Miranda said. “It dries and you don’t have to wipe it, and it sanitizes everything.”
• 150 cases of disinfectant and cleaner to be used in spray bottles and mop buckets. “We have dispensing stations in all the custodial closets,” Miranda said. “This is disinfectant that we’ve been using all along, but we actually doubled the order on this so we’d have enough to get us through the school year.”
Photos Courtesy of Gary Miller