Category: Safety Blog

Good morning and Happy Friday! We hope everyone has had a safe and successful first week of school. This week’s Safety Snippet, while helpful for your work environment, is more for you and your family to become better prepared should a disaster or emergency strike. September is Emergency Preparedness Month and here are a few resources from FEMA and Ready.gov to assist you in becoming more prepared. Stay safe and enjoy your weekend!

https://www.ready.gov/september

Good Morning and Happy Friday! This week’s safety snippet is from School Safety and is a toolkit full of resources covering the following topics: Bullying and Cyberbullying, Child Exploitation, Emergency Planning, Cybersecurity, Mental Health, School Climate, Threat Assessment and Reporting, Targeted Violence, and Infectious Disease/Public Health. It also has several other hyperlinks from a grant finder to school safety/readiness checklists.

In closing, we want to take this Friday to thank and recognize all the Facility, Maintenance, and Custodial staff for your tremendous hard work throughout the summer to get all of your buildings ready for the school year. We wish all of you a safe and relaxing Labor Day Weekend!

Good afternoon and Happy Friday!! As we are fast approaching the start of school, we thought we would put together a quick handout of the common fire and safety violations we see. Enjoy and feel free to use how you see fit. Have a great weekend and stay safe!

Good morning and happy Friday! This week’s Safety Snippet is part of OSHA’s Safe and Sound Week 2024. This is a Job Hazard Analysis Power Point to aid you and your staff in conducting job hazard analyses to prevent injuries. Enjoy your weekend and stay safe!

Good morning and Happy Friday! As we close in on the new school year this week’s safety snippet is a checklist packet, from some of our other BOCES partners, that covers are few things that we look for during safety and fire inspections. Feel free to share with your teachers who will hopefully develop and maintain good habits, at the start of the school year, for a safer learning environment. Enjoy your weekend and stay safe out there!

Good morning and happy Friday! While this is an older advisory it is a good refresher that gained a lot of attention this week in our state safety group. The discussion was in regard to other electrically operated equipment such as gym curtain dividers and bleachers. The result was that there should be signage and training for these electrically operated devices as well. Enjoy your weekend and stay safe!

Good morning and happy Friday! This week’s safety snippet is a refresher on all things fire extinguishers from the NFPA and Fire Equipment Manufacturers’ Association. Enjoy your weekend and stay safe.

Good morning and Happy Friday!! This week’s safety snippet we are again focusing on chemical safety as it pertains to science labs. This is one area that PESH will be looking for if they inspect your facilities. Each school district is required to have a chemical hygiene plan with a named chemical hygiene officer who is tasked with ensuring chemicals are stored correctly and are rotated out for hazardous waste disposal at regular intervals. Chemicals that should not be in science labs, but we are still finding, are: Nitric Acid, Methanol, Mercury, Picric Acid, and formaldehyde. If you want us to come out and take a look at your school’s science labs and chemical hygiene plans, please reach out to John Hanbach or Tim Richardson, your CA BOCES Safety Technicians, to schedule a visit.

Enjoy your weekend and stay safe!

Good morning and Happy Friday! We hope everyone has been able to find some relief from the heat at some point during the week. This week’s safety snippet comes from the NYS DOH’s School Environmental Health Program’s “Tools for Schools.” This topic usually gets a lot of attention at our facilities and the Department of Health fields a lot of requests for this topic at their regional and state safety conferences. We figured we would share a couple of their checklists and info sheets regarding Indoor Air Quality and advice to help find the “smell.” Enjoy your weekend and stay safe!

Good morning and Happy Tuesday! With the Head Advisory going into effect, today, we wanted to share NOAA’s Weather Report for the remainder of the week and the CDC’s Heat Related Illness Fact Sheet. Hydrate, take frequent breaks, and find shade when you can. Stay safe and enjoy your week!

Good morning and Happy Friday! As we close down the school year this topic becomes important as we store a lot of “stuff” during the summer. From ergonomics to safely stacking and moving materials this OSHA “Material Handling and Storage” Guidebook gives us some helpful tips to keep ourselves safe and be mindful of how we store materials. Enjoy your weekend and remember to take breaks and hydrate during next week’s warm up.

Good morning and Happy Friday! As we approach the end of the school year many of us have teen summer workers. This link has a lot of resources dealing with their safety and training: https://keepteenworkerssafe.org/.

This week, Cattaraugus-Allegany BOCES Health and Safety Technicians attended the Association of Education Health and Safety Professionals (AESHP) Summer Conference. We are starting to get some of the presenters’ resources from this conference and will get them out to everyone. A couple of hot topics were storing and charging of lithium-ion batteries in the schools, NYS PESH presented tips on how to handle inspections, and a great presentation on safety in science labs that focused on roles/responsibilities of your school’s Chemical Hygiene Officer.

Enjoy your day and have a great weekend!