Reply to Have you ever found lice in your kids' hair and NOT reported it to the school?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Our school does not notify parents even if you report a case.  The issue then tends to escalate until parents get fed up and out themselves to the school-wide WhatsApp group.  By then dozens of people chime in.   [/quote]

Our school is like this but I think they are handcuffed by district policy. It's a liability issue -- they are afraid to do anything that could be viewed as disclosing private health info, even in an attenuated way. And they don't want to do anything that could be viewed as causing or contributing to a child or family being bullied, ostracized, or otherwise impacted. Because lice has no negative health outcomes other than just being very, very annoying, it is harder for them to justify actions as being central to public health -- most districts do not treat lice as a public health concern.

This is why I think there needs to be an anonymous reporting system that alerts families of any report. Then you totally relieve families of any trepidation they might feel in reporting that they have a case but still give other families a chance. I think most of the time people are just embarrassed.[/quote]

Just another piece of evidence of the degradation of public schools.  I remember our elementary school principal personally coming into our class at least a couple times per year (or another employee at times) checking us for lice.  If you had lice, you either had to have a doctor note it was cleared or be checked by school again. But someone deemed that was deemed that discriminatory and unnecessarily kept kids out of school [/quote]

This isn't about "the degredation" schools. Pediatricians generally don't want you coming in for lice unless you've treated with OTC treatments for a while and it's not working. Even then, you're better off calling a lice lady or going to a "lice salon" because not combing is the best treatment. The most a doctor can give you is a script for one of the shampoos that is supposed to kill both lice and nits, but frankly I don't trust them. You need to nit comb and do a smothering treatment every 7 days for three weeks to make sure you completely kill the life cycle.

The old policy of sending kids home and letting them come back in a day or two with a doctor's note would not work now. It takes longer than that to guarantee a kid is nit free (even the lice salons usually tell you to come back for additional treatment in 7-10 days because they can't guarantee they'll get every last not the first time, even though they are pros at it). Plus lice today are largely immune to the lice shampoos.

The current policy is better public health policy based on what we now understand about lice. It's not about equity.

The part where they don't tell families about lice outbreaks is about litigiousness. [/quote]

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