Gainesville, Georgia-based Hall County Schools is testing out a new process to sanitize its school buses.

Using products from maintenance and cleaning solutions supplier Zep Corp., the district is employing a three-step process that involves cleaning and disinfecting the interior surfaces of each bus with a coating solution, Clay Hobbs, the district’s director of transportation, told School Bus Fleet.

“With the pandemic, this is the time to add something that can help protect our students and our drivers,” Hobbs said. “We started testing the coating solution on two of our buses closer to the beginning of the [2020-21] school year, fine-tuning the process until we got it right.”

Currently, a total of four Hall County Schools employees — two school bus drivers and two staff members outside of the transportation department — are tasked with applying the process to four of the district’s buses each day, Hobbs told SBF. He added that the staff members start by spraying a foam solution to clean the interior surfaces of the bus and then wash the foam off with a light-duty pressure washer. After the bus is dry from the wash, Hobbs said that the coating solution is applied with an electrostatic sprayer, reportedly killing any germs and viruses on surfaces for six months or up to a year.

Hall County Schools has a total of 341 school buses in its fleet and plans to treat 84 of them with the new disinfection process, according to Hobbs.

“If things continue to go well, we anticipate adding this process to our entire fleet,” he said. “This will save time for our drivers, as they previously had to disinfect their buses twice a day — once after their morning routes and once more after their afternoon routes.”