Schools ask Friendswood parents to keep sick kids at home

By BILL MURPHY
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Jan. 30, 2009, 10:56PM

WHEN TO KEEP A CHILD AT HOME
HISD has established policies about when ill students and those recovering from illnesses must stay home. Other school districts have similar policies.
• Children are sent home when their temperatures exceed 100 degrees. They cannot return for 24 hours.
• They cannot return until they are fever-free and have been off of medication, such as Tylenol, for 24 hours.
• They cannot attend school if they have been vomiting or have diarrhea.
Source: Houston ISD

Nurse Anne DeLay has seen it happen all too often at HISD’s Poe Elementary School.
Parents give children a dose of Tylenol in the morning, the children feel fine a short time later, and the parents send them to school.

“But the Tylenol wears off about lunch. The fevers return, and I have to call parents and tell them to get their kids,” said DeLay, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers’ nursing task force. “By the time they come, how many kids will (the sick children) have exposed to the illness?”
Friendswood Independent School District notified parents this week that an increasing number of ill students — sick from the flu, stomach viruses and colds — were being sent to school. Parents were told to keep the children at home until they recover.
“Maybe parents don’t realize how easy it is for one of these illnesses to spread,” said Barbara Steinhauser, lead nurse for Friendswood ISD.
Schools are viewed as such germ factories that some doctors theorize that the spread of the flu among adults could be reduced in a community if all its schoolchildren were vaccinated, said Paul Glezen, leading epidemiologist at Baylor College of Medicine’s Influenza Research Center.

An average number of flu cases have been reported in Harris County so far this winter, Glezen said, but the season won’t hit its peak until next month.

The flu vaccine, he said, protects people against one of the common strains of the virus but not against a second strain that has cropped up in the United States in recent months.
But schools have more to worry about than just the flu. Stomach viruses, strep and the common cold all are communicable illnesses easily spread in a classroom, said Evelyn Henry, the Houston Independent School District’s director of health and medical services.

“We try to train them, but kids are kids,” DeLay said. “They share stuff, whisper. They pick their noses and shake somebody’s hand.”

About 12 students came down with upper respiratory infections at an Aldine Independent School District intermediate school this week, said Melinda Phillips, district program director for health services. Some had the flu.
She declined to name the school, saying she didn’t want to alarm parents.

Some parents take children’s temperatures in the morning and believe that they have recovered because they aren’t registering fever-level readings, Phillips said.

“Parents don’t understand that fevers are generally lower in the morning,” she said. “Later in the day, the fever comes back up.”

At schools in the Friendswood district, more students have colds, stomach viruses and other illnesses, but only a few have come down with the flu, Steinhauser said.

DeLay said she has not seen an uptick in illnesses so far this winter at Poe, near Shepherd and the Southwest Freeway. But she is worried that when the flu season arrives in earnest, more parents may feel compelled to send a sick child to school because they fear skipping work during the recession.


“I understand that people are worried about their jobs … but this is a public health issue,” she said.
bill.murphy@chron.com