Summer is the only time of year your team isn't running flat-out against a bell schedule. The building is empty, the pace is set by the work instead of the day, and for a few weeks you can actually teach. Most building teams let that window close without using it — and then spend the school year trying to correct habits in five-minute conversations between tasks, which never works.
Training that happens during the school year competes with everything else and loses. Training that happens in the summer, on the actual equipment, in the actual rooms, with time to do it right, is the training that changes how the work gets done. Here are five ways to make the most of the window you have right now.
1. Train on the equipment your team avoids — not the equipment they already use.
Every crew has tools that sit in the closet because nobody's fully comfortable with them. The auto-scrubber that only one person runs. The floor machine that gets used for stripping but never for the burnishing or scrubbing it could do. The carpet extractor that's intimidating enough that the team reaches for a spot machine instead. The pressure washer. The wet vacuum that's faster than a mop for half the jobs people still mop.
Summer is when you bring those out and run real hands-on sessions. Not a demo where everyone watches one person — actual reps where each crew member sets the machine up, runs it, breaks it down, and cleans it. The goal is for the avoided tool to become the default tool, because the default tool is almost always faster and produces better results. A team that's comfortable on the auto-scrubber finishes summer floors faster and keeps hallways cleaner all year. The training pays for itself in the first month.
2. Teach the "why" behind the chemicals, not just the dilution.
A crew that knows neutral cleaner from a degreaser from a disinfectant — and knows why each one exists — makes better decisions on every task without being told. A crew that only knows "blue bottle for floors" reaches for the wrong product the moment the situation is slightly different from the one they were shown.
Use the summer to teach the categories. What a neutral cleaner does and where it belongs. Why an acid handles mineral scale and an alkaline handles grease. What disinfectant dwell time actually is and why wiping it off early defeats the purpose. How dilution ratios work and why "more is better" is usually wrong and sometimes dangerous — and that accurate dilution comes down to measuring, not pouring by eye. A dedicated set of measuring cups or a graduated dilution pitcher at the mixing station keeps ratios honest and cuts wasted product; there are a few on the Recommended Tools page at facilityinsight.com that earn a spot in the chemical-mixing kit. Walk the chemical storage area together and read the labels and safety data sheets as a group. The team that understands the categories stops guessing, stops mixing things that shouldn't be mixed, and stops wasting product. This is also the cleanest place to build in safe-handling habits while you have everyone's attention and time.
3. Cross-train so no single task lives in one person's head.
Every building has at least one job only one person knows how to do. The boiler-room routine. The gym floor. The specific way the kitchen hood filters come out. The order the auditorium gets reset. When that person is on vacation, out sick, or moves on, the knowledge leaves with them and the task gets done badly or not at all until someone reverse-engineers it.
Summer is when you spread that knowledge out. Have the person who owns each specialized task teach it to at least one other crew member, hands-on, start to finish. Better yet, have the learner write the steps down as they go — that becomes the start of a real procedure document the whole team can use. Cross-training is not just resilience for when someone's out. It raises the floor on the whole crew, because the act of teaching forces the expert to articulate what they actually do, and that often surfaces a better way to do it.
4. Build the training around documents the team helps write.
Training that lives only in a one-time conversation evaporates. Training that produces a written procedure — a one-page how-to taped inside the supply closet, a checklist for a recurring task, a labeled diagram of which unit is which — stays. And the most useful procedures are the ones the team writes together, in their own words, while doing the actual job.
Pick a few high-value tasks this summer and turn each training session into a document. The crew runs the task, talks through each step, and someone captures it plainly: what you need, what order, what to watch for, when you're done. Keep it short and specific to your building. A procedure written by the people who do the work, for the people who do the work, gets used. A procedure handed down from a binder nobody opened doesn't. (This is the exact topic Issue #004 covered — writing procedures that support your team instead of sitting on a shelf — and summer is when you actually have time to build them.)
5. Schedule the training instead of hoping it happens.
The reason most summer training never happens isn't a lack of will. It's that the project work — floors, restrooms, deep cleaning — expands to fill every available hour, and training is the thing that's always "next week" until school starts. If it isn't on the calendar with a date and a name attached, it doesn't happen.
Block it like you'd block a floor job. Pick the topics, put them on specific days, assign who leads each one, and protect the time. An hour of equipment training on a Tuesday morning is not time lost from the summer schedule — it's time that makes the rest of the summer schedule faster. Build a simple summer training plan at the start of the season: the skills you want the team to have by August, the sessions that get them there, and the dates. Then treat those dates as fixed, the same way you treat the day school opens.
The bigger picture — the empty building is the best classroom you get.
When school is in session, you train in the cracks, and training in the cracks doesn't stick. When the building is empty, you have the equipment, the rooms, and the time to teach the way teaching actually works — hands-on, unhurried, on the real job. That window is open right now and it closes in August.
The building teams that come back in the fall sharper than they left are the ones that treated summer as a training season, not just a cleaning season. The equipment gets run better, the chemicals get used right, the specialized tasks stop being single points of failure, and the procedures exist on paper. None of that happens during the school year. All of it can happen in the next few weeks.
Talk soon, Daniel Mendoza Facility Insight
P.S. Safety training is the easiest kind to schedule into a summer plan — and the most important to document. The K-12 Facilities Safety Talk Program gives you 24 ready-to-deliver safety talks plus an annual training log to record every session, with the date and who attended. Use them weekly or monthly, all school year. Get it here → — $37
P.P.S. Building summer procedures from scratch? The K-12 Summer Facilities Checklist Bundle gives you a head start with ready-made checklists you can hand to the crew — $27 →