TO CLOSE OR NOT TO CLOSE? | Some shutting down despite CDC's advice
The number of students staying home sick with the flu is multiplying nationwide, and normally quiet school nurses' offices suddenly look like big-city emergency rooms, packed with students too ill to finish the day.
The federal government has urged schools to close because of the swine flu only as a last resort. But dozens of schools are closing, and school officials say that's because they're being hit so hard and so fast by the H1N1 virus that closing for a few days is the only feasible option.
"There was nothing else we could do," said Michael Frechette, superintendent of Connecticut's Middletown Public Schools. One middle school closed for the rest of the week after 120 students stayed home sick Monday and 25 were sent home by noon Monday. "The only way to stop that transmittal was to keep the kids home for the rest of the week," he said.
At least 351 schools were closed last week, affecting 126,000 students in 19 states, according to the U.S. Education Department. So far this school year, about 600 schools have temporarily shut their doors.
The number of closures this year appears on target to surpass the roughly 700 schools closed last spring when the swine flu outbreak hit.
"This is scary," said Kathryn Marchuk, a nurse whose son attends St. Charles East High School, which closed for three days last week after about 800 of 2,200 students called in absent. "So many people are sick. It's just everywhere."
Many school officials said they were afraid the virus would spread faster if they stayed open.
"Students are in such close proximity and they're in two or three classrooms a day at two or three different desks," said Donna Lovell, director of Berea Community Schools in Kentucky, which closed for four days last week after 20 percent of students called in sick. "It's an incubator situation."
Whether closing schools is effective in limiting the spread of the flu is debatable. Some experts say closing schools merely spreads the number of cases over a longer time.
But school officials including Frechette disagree.
They say students who get sick this week while they're at home cannot infect nearly as many people as they could if they were walking the halls at school.
"Nobody's at school, so they're not infecting each other," he said. Besides, he said, "Kids are dying, [and] it's just four days."
AP
