 Photo Special To The Town Crier
Many parents at Loyola School have been rigourously trying to rid their children of head lice this month. Left, children with lice require specialized treatments with combs designed to remove the parasites and their eggs. An outbreak of lice at Loyola School last week has prompted several parents to question the Los Altos School District’s new board policy on treating the problem.
Head lice are parasitic insects that live in the hair and scalp of humans, most commonly on children ages 3-10. Lice are highly contagious and can be passed along easily when children share hats, brushes or combs, headphones, T-shirts or other personal items. Lice cannot leap or fly, but they can crawl between items, such as coats hanging close to each other.
Last year, due to increasing numbers of hard-to-control lice incidents, district officials drafted a new board policy, adopted by the trustees at the end of the 2007-2008 school year.
The new policy states that school employees are expected to report all cases of head lice to the school office as soon as possible. If a student is found with active, adult lice, parents should be immediately contacted and the student excused from school until proper treatment is administered.
At that time, a letter will be sent to the other parents notifying them of the outbreak and advising them to check their children’s hair for lice.
If a child has lice, parents are asked to report the case to the school as soon as possible. If two or more students in one class have lice, the entire class will be checked.
A child will not be readmitted until the school nurse checks the child’s hair for signs of lice or lice eggs and the child passes the district’s no-nit policy.
Anna Durante, a parent of two children at Loyola, said her son contracted lice at the end of last year and was exposed to it again last week. She said many parents are upset because their children are getting lice multiple times.
“A lot of parents are feeling that they are checking their children’s hair and they send their child back and they just get (lice) again and again,” Durante said.
Durante said the district’s new no-nit policy is flawed. Nits are lice eggs that hatch into lice. Getting rid of every nit in the child’s hair is very difficult, she said.
Loyola Principal Laura Bence said that part of the problem is that parents discover their children have lice and do not report the case to the school.
Since the beginning of the year, the school has had 18 reported cases of lice and four additional cases discovered through classroom checks. Loyola has approximately 530 students and 4 percent of the population has reported cases of lice since the beginning of the school year.
“Once lice have been reported in a classroom, then it is really the parents’ responsibility to check their own children,” Bence said. “And if they have it, they need to report it – that way the whole class will be checked.”
Classroom checks are not made if only one student has a case of lice, a policy that Durante said needs to be revisited.
“That (part of the policy) makes no sense, since our kids run out at recess and lunch and play with kids in their entire grade,” Durante said in a letter to the Town Crier. Also children in upper grades rotate classrooms for subjects, leaving whole grades at risk of contracting lice, she added.
“By the time lice is found, it’s likely that other children in the classroom have already been affected,” said Jill Crowley, Loyola parent. “And, sending the kids home one by one, just to have them go back to an environment where they get reinfested, is a real burden on working parents and their pocketbooks.”
Durante said she has asked the district for a schoolwide check for lice so they can get rid of the lice outbreak at the school once and for all.
Bence said someone at the county level advised against the check because the outbreak does not qualify as an epidemic, based on the reported and recorded cases of lice found at Loyola.
Some parents said they feel that 22 cases of reported lice at the school is not a proper representation of the “epidemic” the school faces.
“Since the spring, I regularly (2-3 times a week) go over my kid’s hair with the proverbial fine-toothed comb,” said Stephanie Kay, Loyola parent, in an e-mail to the Town Crier. “It takes an hour to do each child, but I’ve learned that it is the only way to be absolutely sure they remain lice-free. More time and more effort on my part because the district, and now the county, wants to hide behind an arbitrary number instead of deal with the real issue of a runaway epidemic in its midst.”
Superintendent Tim Justus said that the board is open to re-examining the policy and possibly making revisions.
On Monday, after press deadline, district trustees were scheduled to discuss the problem and hear parent comments on the situation.
Bence said that an official from the county is scheduled to speak on the issue at a parent assembly this week at Loyola.
Contact Traci Newell at
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2 Comments
2Comment
at Thursday, 09 October 2008 10:42
The key is with an educated community who know to do routine screening and earliest possible detection -- when there aren't many nits to remove. Head lice prevention and sound managment is accomplished through being proactive....not reactive. People can have many opinions from various perspectives, but fact is nits hatch lice and keep the cycle going.
1Comment
at Thursday, 09 October 2008 09:00
Here in Holland there are lice outbreaks too at primary schools.
Standard procedure is: all children are checked at school every week after the holidays.
If lice are found, the child stays at school, hair and clothes are treated and/or washed (treating and washing is responsablility of the parents).
In case of an outbreak all coats at school are covered individually in plastic.
In this way the outbreaks are controlled rather quickly.
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