by James A. Baumann
As housing departments prepped for students’ return to campus, there were a number of factors to consider about quarantine housing. How many rooms would be needed? Where would they best be located? How would students eat? The list went on and on, and somewhere in there was the question of how to manage students’ laundry needs. “Honestly, I wish I could remember what started the conversation. I believe a member of our leadership team heard someone mention laundry on a webinar, so we made a plan,” says Mallory Sidarous, the director of university housing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. “It was important to us that we could provide laundry as an option for the student who was on their last day before laundry day and then found out they had to quarantine.”
The team at SIUE developed a plan where trash bags – along with cleaning supplies, gloves, hand soap, and other items – would be included in the supply kits left for students who were quarantined. Students were then told that the campus would do one load of laundry for them. “The students put everything in the bag and leave it outside their door,” Sidarous explains. “They coordinate with our facilities office staff about when it is going to be picked up. Our building services workers wash and dry the load and then take it back to the door, in a new bag. We let them know that they shouldn’t put anything in that cannot go through a normal cycle with wash and dry.”
Through the first semester there were 17 units that required the service, including three cases where two bags were laundered because there were multiple residents. One unit that had a family living in it had laundry done twice. “In general, it has worked well. I can imagine it would become challenging on staff to have enough capacity to handle if our quarantine and isolation numbers were higher or if we had more people that wanted to use the service,” says Sidarous. "Then we would have had to explore other options."
As is often the case, campuses had to develop the plan that worked best for their facilities and situation. Some campuses were unable to provide laundry services and, instead, encouraged students to be prepared with additional linens, towels, and clothing to last through a two-week quarantine. Others were already contracted with third parties to manage laundry. At some schools, washing machines and driers were located on the same floor as quarantined students, so they were able to continue to wash clothes as needed. Others collected student laundry in water-soluble bags that dissolved in the washing machine. At Saginaw Valley State University in University Center, Michigan, students were provided with a drying rack and sachet of detergent usually used for camping so they could wash some items in their sinks.
One option for a number of campuses in the U.S. was the Quarantine Wash and Fold Program, a contactless laundry service developed by Tide Cleaners. The program allows students to bag their laundry and leave it outside their room before it would be secured and quarantined for 24 hours to reduce the risk of transmission. University staff would choose the drop-off and pickup times, and local Tide partners professionally machine washed the laundry in cold water, then dried and folded it at discounted bulk rates for the school and at no cost for the students. Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was one of the schools to contract with the program. “It’s a relief for parents to know, when their child is sick, they can have their laundry cleaned and dropped off, and that’s one less thing to worry about,” says Melissa DePretto Behan, senior director for student life. “It allows us to tell students, and make it a reasonable expectation, that they can’t leave their room when they’re in quarantine.”
Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, was another participating campus. Brittany McDermott, the coordinator of student support, notes the elimination of employee exposure as another reason for utilizing the program. “It takes one more thing off their plate,” McDermott says of both students and staff. “It’s really reassuring for my team not to have to deal with it. The whole process was easy because we didn’t have to learn new laundry procedures for COVID, plus it keeps students out of shared laundry rooms.”
James A. Baumann is editor of the Talking Stick.