Midwest School District Pilots Autonomous Scrubbers, Staff Estimate Four Hours Daily

Custodial hours the district wanted back

Cleaning a school building is a scheduling problem as much as a labor problem. Floors need attention after the day ends, and custodial crews have a limited number of hours to cover corridors, classrooms and common areas before students return.

The district's stated reason for the lease was to reduce custodial hours. Its operations lead centered the discussion on an overnight demo building, where the question was whether a machine could take over part of the floor work that would otherwise fill a custodian's night.

Staff said the freed time could move custodians onto tasks that crews otherwise cannot reach during nightly shifts. That idea, more than raw hours, shaped how the board approached the decision.

A pilot first, with a year of data before scale

The board approved a lease running four years for autonomous floor scrubbers, but the district agreed to start small. It would pilot one or two units in the demo building and gather data before any broader rollout.

One board member said the district would run a year of data before wider use. That sequencing set the pace for the whole project and kept the decision tied to what the building actually showed.

Staff described cameras and sensors that identify flooring needs, cleaning close to walls, and units that dock and charge themselves. The units also report where material prevents cleaning, and usage reports were cited as a benefit. Support was part of the package too: the lease coverage includes mechanical support for the lease term, and the lithium batteries were described with an estimated lifespan of ten years.

• Board approves a lease running four years for autonomous floor scrubbers
• Pilot one or two units in one demo building
• Collect usage reports and building data through the pilot year
• Review results before any broader rollout
• Redeploy custodians to nightly tasks crews cannot reach, if the pilot supports it

What the district can say so far

The headline figure is roughly four hours of custodial time freed per day for one custodian in the demo building. That number is a staff estimate offered during the board discussion, not a measured result, and it reads best as the district's expectation rather than a logged outcome.

The lease cost was approximately $90,000 over four years. Those two figures frame the decision: a small pilot footprint, a long lease, and a labor estimate the district planned to test over a full year.

Staff expected the freed time to go toward work crews cannot reach on nightly shifts, rather than simply shortening the schedule. Whether that holds will depend on the year of data the board set aside before any wider use.

Where a lease fits a pilot like this

Service Robot Co. is a full service, OEM neutral commercial robot integrator for US businesses. We select the right robots across manufacturers, then finance, deploy, integrate, train and service every unit through a nationwide US engineer network, so one vendor covers the whole lifecycle.

We lease robots only. A customer gets a robot through financing on a three year lease, with one fixed payment quoted after a site assessment. For a facility weighing a pilot like this one, that assessment is where floor layout, shift timing and cleaning targets get measured before any cost is committed.

A district in the position described here could ask for the same sequence: a pilot footprint, a defined data window and a review before wider deployment. That planning is what our integration work is built around, and it keeps a labor estimate honest.