The flu and other illnesses have been hitting Scurry County schools hard this week.
Snyder ISD nurse Chris Bane said Snyder experienced a drop in attendance.
Last week, Snyder Primary School had 93 percent attendance, the intermediate had 96 percent, the junior high school had 95 percent, and the high school had 94 percent.
“It looks like we were hit a little bit harder this week,” she said. “We’ve seen an increase of kids absent. It looks like our highest concentration of flu-like symptoms was at the intermediate campus. The next highest was primary, and then junior high and then high school.”
Bane said that overall district attendance was down to 92 percent. She said that 82 children had been absent this week from the primary school alone, bringing that campus’s attendance down to 90 percent.
Snyder High School is faring better than other Snyder ISD campuses.
“I have not sent that many home from the high school. We had more trouble before Christmas,” Bane said.
Unfortunately, the flu is not the only illness students have to worry about.
Bane said Snyder had seen a lot of strep throat and mono this year. She said she had even seen mixtures of two or even all three of the illnesses going around.
Ira principal Dale Jones said that on Tuesday Ira had 26 kids out sick, for an attendance rate of 90 percent for the district. He said that the majority of those cases were due to the flu or flu-like symptoms, although Ira had seen some strep as well.
“I don’t know that they’re testing everybody that goes in (for the flu),” Jones said. “I think they’re at that point where, if you have those symptoms, they’re telling you to treat it like the flu.”
Jones said that Ira ISD is trying to prevent the spread of illness as much as possible by asking parents with students that have a fever or other symptoms to stay at home. Their policy is that when a student has been fever- and symptom-free without medication for 24 hours, they can return to school.
“We’ve asked parents not to send their kids to school if they have symptoms, because we don’t want to spread it,” Jones said. “So they’ve been keeping them home, which is good, because we do not need to keep spreading it.”
Hermleigh ISD nurse Cati Patrick said that this year seems to have a worse flu season than last year, but that most of the students she had seen with flu-like symptoms didn’t stay sick for as long as the flu usually lasts.
“They might have some of the symptoms, but it doesn’t seem to be lasting as long or the fever doesn’t get as high,” she said. “If they’ve gotten their flu shot, it just doesn’t seem to be lasting as long, whereas a couple of years ago, we had kids out for like a week at a time, and now some of them aren’t gone nearly as long.”
Patrick said that Hermleigh had several students that were symptomatic but not getting tested because they weren’t running a fever, and their illness did not last long enough to deem testing necessary.
Snyder Christian School was hit particularly hard last week, even calling off classes in the latter part of the week. Principal Jennifer Haynes said that when students returned to class on Tuesday, 10 were out with the flu, and the next day they had 12 students out, so school was cancelled for the rest of the week.
“You don’t know, really, what to do. Calling off was a hard thing to decide,” Haynes said.
“When you’ve got that much of your student body gone, it seems silly to continue.”
This week, however, has been a bit better. On Tuesday only four of the 55 students were still out.
Image
Body