Under Quarantine

SMSD is now recommending a seven day leave of absence from school for any student diagnosed with Influenza. Commonly referred to as the flu, Influenza is a highly contagious viral infection that affects your respiratory system, causing mild to severe illness.

During the flu season of the 2017-18 school year, there were an estimated 900,000 hospitalizations around the nation as well as 80,000 deaths — 181 being children — from Influenza. According to SMSD Health Services Coordinator Shelby Rebeck, after the deadliest flu season in over 40 years, the SMSD school board was motivated to rethink their health plan regarding students.

SMSD thought that fewer students sick at school would reduce the number of additional students and staff to get sick.

The only regulation related to Influenza in previous years instructed students to be fever-free for 24 hours before coming to school.

According to Rebeck, students will be able to choose whether or not they come to school as long as they’re not showing fever symptoms. The schools in the district cannot force students to stay home as they won’t receive a record of the diagnoses from a physician, but in cases where the student is obviously sick they can require that the student goes home from school.

“Typically with influenza, the student feels so sick, they want to be at home, so we’ve never had an issue with requiring a student to stay home,” Rebeck said. “But ultimately yes, we could require a student to leave school if their health condition warranted that measure as we have the duty to protect the health of all students.”

Many teachers like Laure Losey aren’t happy about the idea of their students missing a week’s worth of school, but would prefer that to having the rest of the class get sick.

“We don’t know if we’re around someone who has a low immune system or who goes home to a young child, or an older person with cancer for example,” Losey said. “So I think it’s important to step back, take care of ourselves, and try to not get others sick especially with epidemics like the flu.”

Encouraging students to stay home would help decrease the spread of the virus while also keeping those who are already contagious separate from the rest of the school, according to Rebeck.

However, not all students are on board with the District’s new recommendation. Junior Emory Apodaca wouldn’t consider missing that much school. Even if it helps to contain the spread of Influenza, he believes having to miss that much school would be damaging to anyone’s grades.

“From a health standpoint if that is really how long the disease can remain dangerous or contagious then that’s understandable,” Apodaca said. “But as a student who is very involved missing even two days of school can be a big setback. If I missed seven days I don’t know how I would recover from the amount of work I would have to do.”

However, students coming to school sick likely contributed to the high number of infected students in previous years, according to Rebeck.

Last flu season, East and five other of the 47 SMSD schools had 10 percent of the student body and teachers absent due to Influenza. In a Harbinger poll of 158 students taken during the outbreak last year, 74 percent said they had recently been sick and 25 percent of those didn’t stay home from school. h

Though the flu is contagious for up to a week, symptoms of the virus don’t usually appear until two days after contracting the virus, according to a study done by Harvard Medical School. Because of this, the new policy would not be able to completely stop the spread of influenza.

Contrary to Apodaca’s thoughts, Sophomore Annabelle Moore thinks this is a good policy because fewer people will get sick if there’s fewer contagious students around them.

“I think that’s fair because the reason the flu goes around so quickly is because kids come to school when they’re not better,” Moore said. “So I feel like that’s a viable rule because then kids aren’t spreading germs and other people won’t be getting sick.”