Driestar College

Driestar College is a Dutch secondary school that provides various levels of education, including PrO, Lwoo, vmbo, havo and vwo (upper secondary). The main campus is in Gouda.

Driestar College also has satellite campuses in Lekkerkerk and Leiden. The Gouda location has five buildings, four of which are very close together. They offer a range of  different secondary school programmes, from practical training to pre-university education. Each building houses a different type of education. Therefore every pupil feels truly at home. And that is exactly what Driestar College intends!

The pupils in the vmbo basic and advanced vocational programmes are mainly very practically oriented. They function best when the lessons alternate between theory and practice. For example, on the ground floor there is a masonry shop where the pupils learn the tricks of the trade.

Lots of dust develops in this room every day, including harmful quartz dust. Lime dust, dry dust and stone dust settle on the floor. Movement of pupils throughout the shop and activities like sweeping of the floor result in a blanket of grey dust that covers everything in the room. Both the instructors and pupils complained about this.

Mr Grisnich, instructor at Driestar College, said: “If you’re not careful you soon find yourself wheezing. You feel the dust in your body; your lungs are filled with it. At the end of a whole day spent working in the shop you have noticeable shortness of breath.”

The shop had an old dust extractor that no longer functioned adequately. No scheduled maintenance was performed on this extraction system any more either. Grisnich says: “We tried wet mopping and bought a sweeper with built-in vacuum cleaner, but even so, there was still a lot of dust in the air.”

The management was informed of the problems, and because they place great importance on a healthy working environment for pupils and sta approval was granted for purchase of a suitable solution.