Industries
College and university cleaning, building by building
Lecture halls, libraries, residence halls, student unions, rec centers and campus offices cleaned across the Bay Area and the Sacramento region, to the standard and calendar your facilities team sets.
Who the campus plan is for
Fieldstone writes one cleaning plan for the campus buildings you hand us, whether that is a single classroom building or a mix of lecture halls, housing and recreation space. Each building gets its own room list, tasks and schedule, set to the standard your facilities department chooses, and a supervisor walks each building to check it.
This page is for facilities directors, custodial and housing managers and auxiliary services teams at colleges and universities across the Bay Area and the Sacramento region. Housing, dining and academic buildings can sit under different offices. On some campuses the central custodial service leaves out the student union, student housing, the bookstore and the cafeteria. Whichever office owns a building can bring it to us, and the plan follows that office’s rules.
Looking after a K-12 building? Our school cleaning page is written for that after-the-bell routine.
Campus spaces and the work in each
A lecture hall empties every hour, a residence hall lounge never quite does, and a weight room wears differently from a reading room. So the plan splits the campus by space type. The table shows the routine work and the heavier work we schedule for each; your walkthrough sets the frequencies.
| Campus space | Routine visits | Heavier work, booked with you |
|---|---|---|
| Lecture halls and classrooms | Bins, recycling and compost emptied, boards and trays cleaned, desks and tablet arms wiped, seats straightened, floors vacuumed or mopped | High dusting, carpet extraction and tile refinishing between terms |
| Libraries and study rooms | Tables, carrels and study-room desks wiped, stair rails and door handles cleaned, carpet vacuumed, nearby restrooms cleaned and stocked | Carpet extraction and interior glass when the stacks are quiet |
| Residence halls | Lounges, hallways, stairwells, laundry rooms and shared bathrooms on the housing office’s schedule | Room-by-room turnover after move-out, floor work before move-in, summer conference preparation |
| Student unions and dining commons | Seating and tables wiped, trash, recycling and compost cleared, restrooms cleaned and restocked, floors mopped | Resets after events and floor scrubbing or refinishing in the slow weeks |
| Recreation centers | Locker rooms and showers scrubbed, equipment and benches wiped, rubber and hard floors cleaned | Locker-room and restroom deep cleaning during breaks |
| Teaching labs | Floors, sinks, door handles, cabinet fronts, bins and the outside of fume hoods | Benches only where staff have cleared them; the lab’s protocol sets the rest |
| Administrative and department offices | Desks and meeting tables wiped, break rooms cleaned, trash out, carpet vacuumed | Carpet extraction and low-rise window cleaning |
| Restrooms, lobbies and stairwells | Restrooms cleaned, disinfected and restocked each visit; lobby glass, drinking fountains and handrails wiped | Periodic restroom deep cleaning and stairwell floor work |
Recreation centers run on the same locker-room and equipment routine as our gym and fitness center cleaning, and research suites with gowning or controlled rooms move onto the plan described on our labs and cleanrooms page. Department offices follow our office cleaning routine, and our janitorial supplies service can keep paper towels, hand soap and can liners stocked, or crews restock from your own supply room.
Published campus schedules show how much the frequencies vary. One campus may do trash, boards, desks and floors in its classrooms daily with dusting every two weeks, while another does gyms, locker rooms and indoor eating areas daily, labs twice a week and offices weekly. Yours sets ours.
Your campus sets the standard
How clean each building should be is the campus’s call, and the plan is written around it. Campuses often describe the result they want with the five appearance levels published by APPA, the professional organization for educational facilities: Level 1, orderly spotlessness, then ordinary tidiness, casual inattention and moderate dinginess, down to Level 5, unkempt neglect.
In APPA’s descriptions, a Level 1 building has bright floors right into the corners, surfaces free of dust and fingerprints, gleaming restroom fixtures and every light working. At Level 3, floors are swept or vacuumed but stains and edge build-up show, and dust and marks are easy to spot. By Level 5, old dirt and finish have piled up, trash overflows and more than 5% of lamps are out.
APPA advises spelling out service levels so plainly that nobody has to guess which rooms are covered or on what cycle. Our written plan does that: each room type, its tasks and its frequency, built around the level you name for the building. Supervisors check against the same list, as our guide to how a cleaning quality inspection works explains.
Working to the academic calendar
Campus cleaning follows the term, not the month. Routine work runs through each term, heavy work moves into breaks and summer, and residence halls get their biggest push between move-out and move-in.
During the term, classrooms and lecture halls are cleaned after the last class or before the first. Libraries and study rooms that stay open late for finals get their visits moved around those hours. Send us the exam calendar and the schedule shifts with it.
Move-out leaves every room, lounge and shared bathroom in a hall needing attention at once. We clean rooms one by one in the window your housing office sets, then finish hallways, stairwells and common bathrooms before keys go out again. Some housing offices also ready their halls for summer conference programs, with a thorough clean of every residence hall before the conferences and regular common-area cleaning while they run.
Breaks are for the work that needs an empty building: stripping and refinishing corridor and classroom tile, carpet extraction in libraries and offices, high dusting, and window cleaning on low-rise buildings. Our guide on when floors need stripping or extraction helps you list which rooms need it before summer.
Orientation, games and weekend events
Orientation, performances, games and conferences put far more people through a building than an ordinary day. Event cleaning comes in three parts: a refresh before doors open, restroom and trash rounds while the event runs, and a cleanup that leaves the space ready for the next morning’s routine.
Campus event offices plan this early, and many ask hosts to book custodial support at least a week ahead, with the location, date, start and end times, headcount and any food being served. Send us the same details and we staff the event around them, with day porters on the rounds. Large venue-style events follow our hospitality and event venue turn between bookings.
Day crews, night crews or both
APPA lists day, swing and late-night shifts as options and says the choice should be made with the people who use and clean the building. Day cleaning keeps crews in view, so a spill or an empty dispenser gets handled fast, and it cuts the lighting and heating or cooling a building burns after hours. The trade-off: occupied rooms are harder to clean, and a vacuum can disrupt a lecture or a quiet floor.
A Fieldstone campus plan can mix the two. Night crews take classrooms and offices once they empty, and a porter covers restrooms, union seating and lobbies through the day. Evening and weekend visits go wherever your calendar needs them, on top of our recurring janitorial service.
Keys, access cards and background checks
Your campus decides which keys and access cards a crew carries and which work calls for a background check, and our crews follow those rules from the first night. Many campuses issue contractor keys only with facilities approval, with an expiration date on each key.
Background checks follow the same logic. Campus policies can make contractors responsible for checking their own employees when the work is designated sensitive or the law requires it, and for anyone in regular contact with minors, campus-hosted camps included. Fieldstone cleaners are background checked before they start. We are insured and bonded, carry workers’ compensation and send our certificate of insurance before the first visit; your campus says what more a building needs.
Chemicals, safety data sheets and health spaces
A contractor working inside a campus building makes it a shared workplace. California’s hazard communication standard (8 CCR 5194) expects the written program there to say how each employer tells the other about the hazardous chemicals in use, and Safety Data Sheets must be within reach on every shift, on paper or electronically if access is immediate. Our guide on setting up an SDS binder covers the paper side.
Restrooms and high-touch surfaces get cleaned first and disinfected second, the order CDC’s facility guidance gives. Crews use EPA-registered disinfectants for the label dwell time on door handles, desks, stair rails, elevator buttons and restroom fixtures. Our disinfection and sanitizing and restroom deep cleaning services add depth where traffic is heaviest.
Campus clinics and exam rooms are planned room by room. Under Cal/OSHA’s bloodborne pathogens standard (8 CCR 5193), coverage turns on whether a worker’s duties involve reasonably anticipated contact with blood, and the employer makes that call task by task. Health spaces are where it most often applies, so those rooms are settled in the plan before the first visit.
Products that fit campus purchasing rules
The campus’s purchasing rules decide which products come on site. Some campuses keep an approved product list, and others set only a preference for safer alternatives to harsh products. Hand us your approved list and crews work from it.
APPA’s cleaning operations chapter points the same way: third-party-certified products, microfiber cloths and mops, low-VOC chemicals and HEPA-filtered vacuums for indoor air. EPA runs two labels worth knowing when you write a product list: Safer Choice for cleaning products with safer chemical ingredients, and the Design for the Environment logo for disinfectants and sanitizers that meet extra health and environmental criteria.
Campuses across the Bay Area and Sacramento
Fieldstone cleans campus buildings in and around San Mateo, San Jose, Fremont, Oakland, Concord, Elk Grove, Folsom and Roseville, and in every other city on our service area list.
Community college districts, university campuses and private colleges each set their own custodial rules, and our plans start from yours.
Request a campus walkthrough
A campus quote is built from the buildings: square footage and room types, the level you set for each, how often each space is cleaned, the shifts and access rules, event support and the break-time floor and carpet work. We walk the buildings with your facilities or housing lead and send a written plan and quote that lists every space. Request a quote to book the walkthrough.
A few useful answers
Common questions
Can you clean only our residence halls, or only the academic buildings?
Yes. The plan covers whichever buildings your office runs, so a housing department can book its halls and a facilities team its classroom buildings, each with its own schedule and contact.
Where do APPA appearance levels fit in our cleaning plan?
You choose the level for each building, and the written plan sets the tasks and frequencies around it. Supervisor inspections then check the work against that plan.
What gets done in a residence hall after move-out?
Rooms are cleaned one by one in the window your housing office sets. Lounges, hallways, stairwells and shared bathrooms follow, with floor work finished before move-in.
What do your crews clean in a teaching lab?
Floors, sinks, door handles, cabinet fronts, bins and the outside of fume hoods, plus any benches your staff have cleared. The lab’s own protocol sets everything beyond that, and a room posted off-limits is skipped that night.
Will your crews work under our key and access card policy?
Yes. Crews carry only the keys and cards your campus issues, keep to the rooms on their list and hand everything back when asked.
Can you add cleaning for orientation week or a big weekend event?
Yes. Send the dates, locations, times and headcounts, and we add a refresh beforehand, porter rounds during the event and a full cleanup afterward.