Selinsgrove Area Intermediate School

Illness

Your child wakes up feeling sick. Should he stay home or go to school?

While you don't want to jump at every ache, you want to nurse your child back to health if he/she is truly sick. And of course, you don't want to send a sick child to school.

The American Academy of Pediatrics offers three general guidelines on when to keep kids home from school:

• If the child has a fever.
• He is not well enough to participate in class.
• You think he may be contagious

The Report of the Committee on Infectious Diseases by the American Academy of Pediatrics in the 1997 Red Book gave these conditions that should exclude children from a child-care setting:

• Fever, lethargy, irritability, persistent crying, difficulty breathing and/or manifestations of possible severe illness.
• Vomiting two or more times in the previous 24 hours, unless the vomiting is caused by a noncommunicable condition and the child is not in danger of dehydration.
• Diarrhea or stools that contain blood or mucus.
• Mouth sores associated with drooling, unless the child's physician says the child is noninfectious.
• Rash with fever or behavior change, until a physician has determined the illness not to be a communicable disease.
• Conjunctivitis (pink eye) with white or yellow eye discharge, often with matted eyelids after sleep and eye pain or redness of the eyelids surrounding, until examined by a physician and approved for readmission, with treatment.
• Streptococcal pharyngitis (strep throat), until 24 hours after treatment has been initiated, and until the child has been without fever for 24 hours without fever-suppressing medication.

   

State Law on Excluding Students

Students who have been diagnosed by a physician or are suspected of having the following diseases should be kept out of school, according to Pennsylvania law:

• Diphtheria - Two weeks from onset or until appropriate negative culture tests.
• Measles - Four days from the onset of rash. Pennsylvania also requires that if a documented case of Rubeola occurs in a School District, all unimmunized students must be either immunized promptly or excluded from school attendance for two weeks following the last documented case of Red Measles.
• Mumps - Nine days from the onset or until subsidence of swelling.
• Pertussis (whooping cough) - Four weeks from the onset or seven days from the instituting appropriate antimicrobial therapy.
• Rubella - Four days from rash onset.
• Chickenpox - Six days from the last crop of vesicles.( fluid filling skin lesions of Chickenpox disease)
• Respiratory streptococcal infections, including scarlet fever - Not less than seven days from the onset if no physician in attendance or 24 hours from institution of appropriate antimicrobial therpy.

   

The School Nurse presumes that if the child is sent to school, the parent considers him or her to be well enough to attend, unless obvious symptoms of illness exist (A fever of 100 F., vomiting, persistent diarrhea, contagious skin lesions, eye and ear infections, and uncontrollable coughing are some examples). Following an illness, a student should have a normal temperature for 24 hours without fever suppressing medications, before returning to school. It is always helpful to call, leave a message, or give the child a note to be presented to the nurse upon arrival to school when possible symptoms noticed.