Commercial Hood Cleaning for K-12 Schools and Districts
One vendor for every cafeteria and culinary kitchen in your district — cleaned to NFPA 96 Standards, with a report and certificate filed for each site, ready for your fire marshal and your board.
What K-12 Schools and Districts Actually Run
A district is many kitchens on one calendar. Every school has a cafeteria kitchen; a district usually runs a central commissary that preps and distributes; and high schools often add a culinary or career-technical program with its own line. Each has its own hood, duct and rooftop fan, and each loads grease at a different rate — a fry-heavy high school line far faster than an elementary warming kitchen that mostly reheats. What ties them together is the school calendar: these kitchens serve on school days and go quiet on breaks, so the whole district can be cleaned on a schedule built around when students are out.
The Part Nobody Looks At
The mismatch in a district is volume versus attention. Elementary warming kitchens get cleaned because they are simple and visible; the high school culinary line and the central commissary, which carry the real grease load, are the ones a thin facilities budget tends to stretch. Long duct runs to rooftop fans on older school buildings are out of sight and out of the maintenance rotation, and when a district hires a different contractor per school, no one holds the whole picture — a fire marshal asking about one cafeteria gets a different answer, in a different format, than the school across town.
How Often NFPA 96 Requires Cleaning
NFPA 96 sets frequency in Table 12.4 by cooking volume and equipment type. A fry-heavy high school line or a central commissary needs cleaning more often than an elementary warming kitchen that mostly reheats. The correct answer is per kitchen, not per district — which is why the free inspection covers every kitchen in the district and sets an interval for each, rather than putting every school on the same blanket schedule.
What the Service Covers
Every school kitchen gets the full system: hood, plenum, the full duct run, and the rooftop fan, cleaned to NFPA 96 Standards and photographed at every accessible surface. Filters are pulled and exchanged off site under our Grease Filter Exchange program — never cleaned in your kitchen, where grease-laden wash water would enter the drain, damage the grease interceptor and violate the Clean Water Act. Rooftop grease containment protects aging school roof membranes, and fan service keeps airflow up in a cafeteria that has to turn hundreds of lunches in a short window. You see the work at every phase of the engagement — the schedule, the crew on site, the photographs as they are taken, and the report and certificate the moment they are issued — not a single certificate weeks later. Every visit produces a Report of Service and a Certificate of Service, filed by site.
One District, One Standard
A district that hires a different local contractor for each school ends up with a different standard, a different record format, and a different story at every site. We clean every kitchen in the district to one NFPA 96 standard, on a schedule built around your school calendar, and hold the records the same way at every site. Every kitchen is scheduled and verified in HoodOps, and every service record is sealed in EvidLY — which tracks every fire safety and food safety vendor across the district, from suppression, sprinkler, extinguisher and alarm to health-department food safety — so when the fire marshal or the board asks, the whole picture for every school is in one place, and the answer is the same everywhere.