Custodial Services for Schools and Colleges: How Education Buys
Public schools and colleges usually buy custodial services under public purchasing rules, not by simply picking a vendor. A K-12 district typically buys through its own competitive solicitation or through a cooperative purchasing contract, with the director of maintenance or operations building the case and the school board approving it on a budget calendar that runs toward an August start. A college or university typically works through its purchasing office, which may use a system or state contract, a consortium agreement, a cooperative contract, or its own solicitation, and the cost is often split across academic, housing, athletics, and research budgets.
The two buyers look alike from the outside, but they are funded differently, run on different calendars, and clean different buildings. A district's state funding follows daily attendance; a college is paid through tuition and enrollment. A district has one long summer; a campus has move-in, finals, intersessions, and conferences. Advice written for one often does not fit the other, so this guide takes each in turn and then covers what applies to both. If you run facilities at a community college or a university campus, the higher education section is written for you.
This guide at a glance
- How K-12 and college buying differ
- How K-12 districts buy custodial services
- How colleges and universities buy custodial services
- What to ask every vendor, at a school or a campus
- How absences and events should be covered
- When to change custodial vendors
Further down: where McLemore fits.
How is buying for a K-12 district different from buying for a college?
The table below is a general comparison of what is typical. Individual districts and campuses vary, and your own purchasing office has the final word on how a purchase must be made.
| K-12 district (typical) | College or university (typical) | |
| Who typically decides | Director of maintenance or operations, assistant superintendent, or superintendent, then the board | Facilities director or associate VP, with purchasing and sometimes the system office |
| How money is set | Annual district budget, approved by the board | Institutional budget, sometimes split across colleges, auxiliaries and grant-funded buildings |
| How the purchase is usually made | Competitive procurement or a cooperative contract | System or state contracts, consortium agreements, cooperative contracts, or the institution's own solicitation |
| The calendar | One long summer break, plus events | Semesters, intersessions, summer programs, move-in and move-out |
| Buildings | Classrooms, gyms, cafeterias, stadiums | All of those, plus labs, residence halls, clinics, libraries and research space |
| How funding follows students | Daily attendance: in Texas, every absent student costs the district state money | Enrollment and tuition: a student who misses class has already paid |
| What the budget argument often rests on | Attendance funding, instruction, staff retention | Student experience, retention and enrollment, housing revenue, research uptime |
How do K-12 districts buy custodial services?
The cooperative contract route
Public school districts generally cannot just choose a vendor for a contract of this size. Texas districts, for example, must use one of the methods set out in Texas Education Code § 44.031 for purchases of $50,000 or more a year, and a district-wide custodial contract is usually well above that. One of those methods is buying through a cooperative purchasing program.
A cooperative purchasing program works like this. The cooperative runs its own competitive procurement and awards contracts to the vendors that win it. A member district can then contract directly with an awarded vendor, because the competition has already taken place.
McLemore is competitively awarded through four cooperatives: TIPS, Choice Partners, PACE, and 1GPA. Cooperatives award these contracts selectively, and each award means we have already been through a public procurement review. A district that is already a member of one can contract with us directly. A district that is not a member joins by completing a short membership form (usually under ten pages) and getting a board vote.
The practical difference is time. A district that runs its own custodial RFP can spend months drafting, advertising, evaluating, and handling any protest period. With a cooperative contract, that stage is already done, and the main steps left are usually scoping the buildings, pricing the work, and taking it to the board. Depending on the board calendar, that can fit within a single budget cycle.
Board approval and the budget calendar
A district custodial contract typically goes to the board, and many district budgets are built in late winter and spring for a school year that starts in August. If you want a new program in place for the fall, it helps to start the conversation around February, well before anyone is thinking about summer.
Boards tend to ask the same questions. What will it cost compared with what we spend now, including in-house costs we are not counting? Who are the people in our buildings, and have they been background-checked? What happens during the transition? How will we know it is working? It is worth answering those in writing in the board packet so members don't hear the answers for the first time at the meeting.
Attendance is a budget line for districts
In Texas, a district's state funding is calculated largely from average daily attendance, the number of students actually present, not just enrolled. Illness-driven absence therefore costs a district money directly, on top of the cost of substitute teachers when staff are out.
A custodial program cannot prevent every flu season, and nobody should promise that it will. It can make disinfecting high-touch surfaces, restrooms, and nurses' stations a scheduled, documented task, not something done when there is time. That documentation also lets an administrator point to it when a parent or board member asks what the district is doing about illness.
What the savings can pay for
The budget case for outsourcing in a district can be stronger than it first looks, because in-house custodial costs are spread across payroll, benefits, supplies, equipment, overtime, and substitute custodians, and they are rarely added up in one place.
A Texas school district that moved its custodial program to McLemore saved more than $150,000 in the first year. The savings came from three places: roughly 20 percent lower supply costs through bulk purchasing, newer floor scrubbers and disinfection equipment that raised cleaning productivity by about 30 percent, and schedules built around how each building was actually used. The district used that money to hire three new teachers. The full case study walks through where each part of the savings came from.
Summer turnover
Summer is when floors get stripped and refinished, carpets extracted, furniture moved, and classrooms reset, all on a schedule that ends when teachers come back. It can also be when an in-house team is shortest-handed, since many staff take their vacation then. Plan the summer scope in the spring, with a campus-by-campus sequence and a firm finish date for each building. Our earlier piece on summer cleaning for schools covers the turnover season in more detail.
How do colleges and universities buy custodial services?
Attendance does not move college revenue
The attendance argument that matters so much to a district does not carry over to a college. Colleges are paid through tuition, fees, and enrollment-based funding, and a student who skips a lecture has already paid for it. A cleaner campus will not change a college's revenue next week the way better attendance changes a district's state funding.
The budget case on a campus rests on different things: what prospective students and parents see on a campus tour, whether current students stay enrolled, whether residence halls fill and keep generating housing revenue, and whether labs and research space stay usable. Build the argument around those, not around absenteeism.
System, state and cooperative contracts
Public colleges and universities often have more purchasing routes than K-12 districts, and which one applies depends on the institution. A campus inside a university system may be able to use a system-wide contract. Many states run statewide contracts that public institutions can use. Higher education also has its own purchasing consortiums. And colleges can use cooperative contracts the same way districts do, including the four McLemore is competitively awarded through: TIPS, Choice Partners, PACE, and 1GPA. Private colleges generally have more latitude to run their own process.
The first question for a college facilities director is therefore procedural. Ask your purchasing office which contract vehicles are open to you before you draft anything. The answer can change the timeline considerably, for example from a few months with an existing contract vehicle to most of a year for a full solicitation of your own.
Decentralized budgets
On many campuses, no single office pays for all the cleaning. Academic buildings may sit in the facilities budget, while residence halls are paid from housing revenue, athletics from the athletics budget, the student center from student fees, and a research building partly from grants. Each owner has its own standards and fiscal pressures.
That affects how a contract should be written. A campus-wide agreement can still price and report building by building, so that housing sees the cost of the residence halls and athletics sees the cost of the arena. Without that, one department can end up subsidizing another, and the contract becomes an argument every budget season.
The academic calendar is the schedule
A college does not have one summer break. It has move-in, the first week of classes, midterms, finals, commencement, winter intersession, summer sessions, camps and conferences, and move-out. Cleaning demand rises and falls with each of those, and a residence hall that has to be turned between spring move-out and a summer conference may have only a few days to do it.
A campus custodial plan should be built around the academic calendar, with staffing and periodic work scheduled around it rather than spread evenly across twelve months.
Buildings a district does not have
Colleges own building types that K-12 contracts rarely have to address: teaching and research labs, clinical and student health spaces, residence halls, libraries open late into the night, performance halls and large athletic venues. Each needs its own scope. A lab may restrict what custodial staff can touch. A residence hall mixes shared bathrooms, lounges, and private rooms. A library open until 2 a.m. needs cleaning while people are still in it.
Scope those buildings individually, with the department that uses each one, before any pricing conversation.
What should schools and colleges ask every custodial vendor?
Who is in the building with students?
Anyone cleaning a school or college after hours has access to spaces students use. Ask every bidder who employs the people who will be in your buildings, who screens them, how they are background checked, and whether the checks are rerun. If any of the crew comes through a subcontractor or staffing agency, ask who sets the screening standard and who is answerable for it.
Employment status alone does not prove screening or training is good, but it does determine which company is responsible for them. Every person McLemore places on a campus is a McLemore W-2 employee, hired, background checked, trained, and supervised by us, and covered by our workers' compensation.
Supervision and reporting
A campus is spread out, and a problem in one building is easy to miss from another. Ask how many supervisory hours are committed to your campus, how inspections are done, and what reporting you will get. Inspection scores by building, completed work orders, and complaint trends should arrive on a schedule, not only when you ask. We wrote more about this in why on-site supervision changes everything.
How should a vendor cover absences and school events?
Two questions are easy to leave out of a school scope and hard to fix once the contract is signed.
When a custodian calls out
A school cannot leave a wing uncleaned because one person is sick, and in-house teams often cover call-outs by stretching whoever is left. Ask each bidder how they cover an absence: whether there is a relief pool, how quickly a replacement arrives, and what happens if no one is available. Ask whether the contract states a minimum staffing level for each campus or only an outcome, and how missed work is reported to you and credited.
Games, graduations and after-hours events
Friday night games, graduations, tournaments, open houses, and board meetings all need cleaning before and after, often outside the normal shift. On a college campus, the list adds move-in weekends, commencement, camps, and conferences. Ask whether event coverage uses additional staff or pulls the regular crew away from routine work. If routine work will be deferred, the contract should specify which tasks will be deferred and when they will be caught up. If additional staff is used, agree in advance how events are requested, scheduled, and billed.
When is the best time to change custodial vendors at a school?
For a school, the start of summer is often the easiest time to change vendors because buildings are empty and staff has time to learn them before students return. A college has shorter windows, such as the weeks after spring move-out or the winter intersession, and transitions work best when sequenced building by building.
Working backward from a summer start, a district using a cooperative contract should typically be talking to vendors in the winter, with board approval in the spring. If you are replacing an incumbent vendor, check the notice deadline in the current contract, not just the end date, because an auto-renewal notice window can close months before the contract expires. For what the handoff itself involves, see how to kick off a risk-free vendor transition.
Where does McLemore fit?
We have run janitorial programs from Houston for more than 50 years. We are competitively awarded through TIPS, Choice Partners, PACE, and 1GPA; every person on site is our W-2 employee, and each campus has a supervisor who is accountable for it. You can see how that works in practice on our education services page.
Other guides, sorted by role and by facility type, including buying, budgeting, and managing custodial services, are in the Facility Services Resource Center.
If you are planning a budget for next school year and want to know what a cooperative contract would look like for your district or campus, we will walk your buildings with you and show you the numbers. Reach the sales team at sales@mbminc.com or (713) 528-7775.