48 hour d+v policy. What's the point of it?

[Edenviolet]

If people ignore it/lie and send their dc in anyway?

AIBU to complain bitterly to the school about this, ask them to send out letters again stating the policy and then actually enforce it rather than believe the crap some parents come up with to avoid keeping their dcs at home?

A child in dd2s class was sick yesterday morning, sent home but apparently 'fine' today??? I was told that he didn't have a bug and had just "drunk too much water/eaten too much"

I'm livid. Dd2 has diabetes and a sickness bug would mean her being hospitalised. Why can't people stick to the rules?

Really depends what dd1 has as she faints a lot and also has a heart problem so sometimes can't be left at all.

That does sound very difficult for you . How on earth is she going to manage as an adult? Will she always need to have a carer? I can't imagine never being able to be left I need my time alone.

Really not sure she may be having surgery at some point but is currently on three monthly reviews

Hedgehog, you sound very 'woe is me' and the whole world has to revolve round your family and their health problems.

I agree that sick children shouldn't be sent into school but how can this be enforced - child sick in the evening / weekend when no one at school knows, children at leisure centres, parks, parties etc? I think most responsible parents wouldn't send an ill child to school but I appreciate it is difficult if they work and rely on wages to pay bills.

I am fortunate that I am a SAHM but I do have a friend who is a single mum with no help, who works for an agency, only getting paid when in work - I understand her dilemma.

Please try to be understanding of other people's problems too - it's not all about you.

My eldest is tube fed and has gastric issues so is sick a lot but the year he cant d+v was horrendous. He lost that much weight the area around his tube (thats in his stomach) would leak with every feed. This meant he lost even more weight and that I was changing his clothes upto 20x in1day as they would become too wet to wear. This took us around 6months to rectify and in that time he had to have a endoscopy done too because of the leak which all happened because he caught d+v at nursery.

There us something wrong in a culture that thinks it's acceptable to send a child to school who has gastroenteritis.

Not only because of the risk of infection but because it's a basic human need, to be home and looked after by a main carer when you feel poorly.

DS has chronic diarrhoea and I had to get him a doctors note saying this, so he wouldn't be sent home daily.

He also vomits when he's eaten too much, and will regularly eat till he's sick, but it's pretty easy to tell the difference to be fair

Scoff scoff scoff, drink, drink, drink, scoff some more, drink, go off and steal food, scoff scoff, drink, heave!

Is totally different to

Eat two spoonfuls of porridge then decorate the entire kitchen.

If DS has a bug he's off his food, if he's on a strange hungry day he will carry on trying to get food even if he's just been sick.

I think bugs are normally accompanied by a temperature, so most parents know. But I agree some are under real pressures to not take time off work, which is irresponsible but on occasion understandable. We had a real run of it when my DD first started nursery (she got noro and afew others and ended up being sent for tests) and we followed the rules, yet got very frustrated knowing she'd caught it at nursery (prob because of some parents not following the rules) but then sent her home immediately at even the hint of a bug. Guess it all helped her now super-strong immune system now though, but utterly ?? at the time....so I feel your pain

My son caught norovirus from a toddler who 'had the runs because of his milk allergy' Some parents are just clueless or in denial.

Haha....like they really hadn't thought of stopping him drinking milk!

Milk as a drink is not the only thing that contains milk - my DD would react to sausages, chicken burgers, bisto, for example. It's not always clear cut.

Hedgehog, I agree with you 100%. I ended up pulling dc2 out of school and he had home studies.

I can entirely understand why well siblings get kept off.

Take a taxi?

So, Journey 1: go there, all children in taxi, to drop off the well one.
Journey 2: come back, just you and ill child.

Journey 3: go there with ill child to pick up siblings.
Journey 4: come back from school with all children in taxi.

For me, it's £5 to get a taxi to the school, one way, so that could be potentially £20 to take them to school, for just one day! If you ask the driver to wait, maybe it would be cheaper to do as a round trip, but the savings won't be that great.

Loveamdsmiles that was an awful post. Hedgehog has not been woe is me. She's replied to each suggestion saying why it won't work. And as for the comment about being more sympathetic to others - I doubt many people have it as hard. I know I certainly don't nor does anyone I know.

And I don't see how the world has to revile around her family. The school say stay off 48h after sickness. All she's doing is wishing that was actually enforced. On any other thread you get told if you don't like the school policy you don't have to send your children to that school but on this thread everyone knows soooo much better than the health protection experts.

And I'm guilty of it myself. Ds was sick at 11am last Saturday. He was fine from then and went to a family do on Sunday with lots of running around and chocolate. Technically he should have been off school till Monday lunchtime. He wasn't. However I know it was wrong and the school would be within their rights to enforce it.

There will always be exceptions to the rule and I do feel for you and your DD.
My DS pooed himself at school one day because he had drunk my orange juice with bits in whilst I was in the loo. Fine after that poo. We now know he has to avoid this.
The other DS coughed himself until he vomited but that is because he has asthma when he has a phlegmy cold. ) If my 2 have cough syrup they can get loose bowels. If the cough is bad enough I will keep them home)
Both were sent home. I sent both back the next day. I know D&V and I know it wasn't that in either case.

YANBU

this makes me irate and I don't even have DCs. Also all this "it's probably food poisoning" nonsense. Half of food poisoning cases are caused by food being prepared by someone with norovirus, meaning you have a contagious stomach bug, whatever way you look at it.

Because someone took their norovirus infected child into school when he was still unwell, most of the class ended up off by the end of the week. My sibs kid caught it, passed it through the entire family since they all lived together. My sis, the mum's, a teacher and her class went without her for several days while this happened so yes, YANBU to think if it's a bug or suspected to be one that they should be kept off.

But if they know it's bad food, food intolerance, too much food or over excitement then no they shouldn't. We all have to use our judgement, if the school enforced the policy to a T-which I don't see how they could unless the parents told them of every D/V incidence- then they'd be only around 60% of the kids in class at any time.

If the incident had happened at home so the parents could monitor and make an informed decision, then fine.

But given, if I've read it correctly, that the child vomited at school and therefore the parents decision wasn't informed, merely a guess, I think in that situation it would be better to err on the side of caution and keep the child off for the prescribed 48 hours.

I wonder whether the 48 hour rule is doing more harm than good by keeping children off school needlessly and encouraging irresponsible parents to lie. I'm not saying it doesn't have it's place but should be used to inform common sense and not as a draconian substitute for it.

Parents who are prepared to lie about the reasons for their DC being sick will probably also be prepared to lie about it having happened at all (unless the child vomitted at school in which case class mates have probably already been exposed). I don't see why they should be allowed to spoil it for the responsible majority who make a sensible and informed decision when their child threw up 36 hours ago after eating too much immediately followed by a bumpy car journey.

Encouraging people to lie about sickness is likely to increase spread of bugs. Careful hygiene is probably the second best infection control method and much better than nothing - which is what will happen if people keep quiet about their symptoms.

We didn't have the 48 hour rule when I was at school but I don't think D&V bugs were any more common then.

YANBU op, it makes me totally irate too :( the 48 hrs wasn't plucked from thin air, it is there for a reason. It is implemented to limit disease spreading and to protect vulnerable children/adults. This is a totally different thing from people with known conditions that have vomiting or diarrhoea as symptoms - which are not infective. Most schools make a distinction between these situations.
Having had to take two weeks of work with my ds who was hospitalised with rotavirus age 10mths I don't think it is unreasonable to take two days off. Yes I was a working mum and my absence caused a great deal of inconvenience to my boss, but they managed.
Hope your dc stay well op

My DH is a teacher & has brought a bug home which floored the 3 of us over a weekend. Clearly caught from a child who should have been kept home. I could have spread it all round my workplace if it hadn't been a weekend. Very selfish. If people stuck to the rule there would be less sickness all round.

"We didn't have the 48 hour rule when I was at school but I don't think D&V bugs were any more common then."

I have wondered about this with myself and my own children. It seems likely to me that in the days when being a SAHM was the norm, then chances are the mothers would be more likely to keep their children off all the time they were showing symptoms, which would at least limit the chance of contagion to a large extent, even if they weren't off for 48 hours afterwards.

I currently live in Norway, where parents are entitled to 10 days off each year (20 days in total for two working parents) for any child under ten years who is ill. I definitely get the impression that there are fewer sickness bugs in the schools here, though obviously I have no statistics to prove it. It seems to me that the problem often lies with the attitude that work had to trump childcare (not necessarily the parents' fault obviously).

I used to be massively annoyed in the UK when my babies were at nursery two days a week, and I would hear parents come in and say "He's vomited this morning, but he seems fine so I brought him in." Grrrrrrrrrr! There were so many bugs passed around, many times probably unnecessarily.

Out of interest, are there any teachers/school staff who can verify this? I seem to recall being told when I was back in the UK, that the school were not allowed to exclude children if their parents' thought they were well enough to stay in school. That even if a child had vomited and the school had phoned the parents, there was no legal way to force the parent to take their child away if they considered the child was fit to go back to class. Not sure if I picked that up wrong.