how does your school deal with head lice???

[pinknfluffy29]

hello all
if i am to get one more "a child in this class has head lice please check your own child" i will scream!!!!
we are having one a week at the moment and my son seems to come home with them once a month.
this means spending a fortune treating everyone and putting undue chemicals on my child's head. when the child who isnt being treated reinfects everyone else!!!!

i am a parent governor and at the next meeting i want to bring up this subject but need some ideas on how other schools deal with it. a school i used to govern at had the same policy for head lice as they did for any other "contagious" ailment - send child home until treated. and not one parent was offended and there was rarely a breakout!!!!

thanks for your help!!!!

My children's school do nothing!

We get'A responsible parent has reported headlice in your childs class, please check the family asap'
Most schools wouldn't go with that policy as it is too likely to offend, I totally agree with it though

we get a standard headlice awareness leaflet. A lot of parents dont even realise that these get sent out if a case is notified or spotted.

Our school is not allowed to even mention it to the family concerned.

I dont use chemicals to check, I wet comb with the Nitty Gritty comb here is the link to the nitty gritty webpage these combs are very easy to use and really do work, they dont sctratch the head as much as theose horrible plastic ones.

Last year I threatened to remove my DD from infants school, if the school didnt do anything about them (the same person was repeated reinfecting everyone else for months, simple things like long hai being tied up would have helped! My DD's have long hair and ALWAYS have it tied up and plaited!) The school gave everyone a free plastic nit comb! I have been told our primary school has an old stock of nit combs but they arent allowed to give them out!!!

we get a letter asking us to check, but i've always wet combed dd once a week anyway. she also has her hair washed in tea tree shampoo and conditioner regularly and sprayed with a 'lice and easy' spray every day, its about as close as you can get to preventative measures. dd's nursery always had the view that with lice, prevention is easier than cure and we've just stuck with it.

The one time that ds had headlice he attended two places. When I notified his nursery they chekced to make sure that I knew how to deal with it and checked all the other children's hair themselves. OTOH, all the creche where he had clearly caught the infestation would do was to try to exclude him until it was clear. I refused to allow ds to be excluded. Why should I if I'm treating him? And how will it prevent other children catching it if they didn't check the others and exclude any ifested? IMO, excluding ds would have been punishing the socially responsible parent.

So I'm against excluding a child with headlice. In some classes anyway it would mean excluding a large proportion of the class. OTOH, if it's clear that the same child is constantly infested, then it may be worth trying some 'shock tactics' to get the parents to do something about it. But unless you have a Nit Nurse, it's just another job for the teahcers.

I'm afraid it is a job for parents, not schools. Most local authorities in the UK will have a headlice policy, which will rarely if ever include excluding children. In our LA, schools are not allowed to 'single out' children, so there is very little the school can do, except inform parents, and in extreme cases have a quiet word with the parent.We had a case recently where a child had live lice crawling all over her head - her mother kept telling her teacher she had treated her, which was very obviously not true.

I'm sure that if schols did exclude for headlice there would be uproar on MN as well as in RL - after all, if you can't exclude a child instantly for biting a teacher, why should you be able to for headlice? Even in the US, where they used to have a stict no-nit policy, the American Academy of Paediatrics is questioning it:
"Numerous anecdotal reports exist of children missing weeks of school and even being forced to repeat a grade because of head lice....In the end, it appears that the only real harm a head louse does is to keep a kid out of school."
Most local authorities in the UK will have a headlice policy, which will rarely if ever include excluding children. In our LA, schools are not allowed to 'single out' children.

having spent five minutes researching lice,I'm now itching like mad!

but how can you really diferentiate a child with say chicken pox or slapped cheek which gets sent home as it is infectious to having head lice?? i think headlice is worse to be honest as with chicken pox or slapped cheek as when my child had it i didnt pump them dull of drugs or chemicals and once they had it was over. but i do have a problem with putting chemicals on my sons scalp and sometimes having to go through 3-4 different treatments to eradicate the lice as now they are becoming tolerant to each and every new treatment. i have been told to have my sons head shaved which i think is outrageous as i dont wish my child to look like a council estate thug. i really struggle with this whole idea of not offending parents if their child is riddled with lice or if their child is a bully etc.. and dont get me started on the whole "cant put suncream on your child" so he must burn debate!!!!!

We get a leaflet too. If a teacher spots a headlice they won't tell the parents which I think is ridiculous. I would want to know if some had been spotted on DD's head!

Of course you shouldn't exclude a child with headlice. I think that is an outrageous suggestion. A child is sent to school to get an education - excluding him/her because his/her parents don't do their job properly would be grossly unfair. If a child has parents who don't give a toss - about headlice or about education that child might be excluded for days on end. Headlice are a right royal PITA - but they are not life-threatening. The sensibilities of parents who get squeamish about finding unwelcome life forms in their childs' hair are not as important as the education of the child who would be excluded.

So there....

Our school informs all the parents that there is an outbreak and every now and again gives out info leaflets. They invite parents to attend a meeting to learn how to deal with the little blighters once or twice a year. That is all they can , or should, do IMO.

I found headlice on DS3 shortly before school time a few weeks back - I rang the school and they told me he could come in as soon as he had been treated. So I applied some ten-minute lice killing lotion and wet-combed before sending him in to school about an hour late.

As "treatment" can simply include wet combing and normal hair conditioner, I don't think that is an unreasonable stipulation. What I do find odd is that I owned up and the school insisted (quite reasonably IMO) that I treat the problem before sending my son in, but had I just sent him in lice and all they would not even have been able to mention the problem to me specifically.

I think it would be reasonable for schools to tell parents (discreetly of course) if their children have headlice, and to insist on treatment (which needn't take long or be unduly expensive) before the children return. If the parents refuse to treat and don't send the child to school over the matter, that should be pursued as truancy.

i am by no means squeamish and view head lice as a part of school life that can be simply dealt with. so what if it was an outbreak of threadworms, or measles or d & v or meningitis?? at the end of the day it doesnt matter what the problem is it is whether schools treat them with the same importance and not just think about offending the parent but about the health of other children in the class.

But headlice ARE NOT as important as d&v, meningitis, or measles. All of those things can seriously compromise a child's health. Headlice don't - unless the problem is left untreated so long that the child develops scalp infections etc. But that isn't the issue with most kids.

Sounds like our prechool is the same as most of the schools on here. We get notes home to say there has been a case of headlice so could we check and treat if neccessary. There isn't an exclusion policy they just ask for co-operation and I have to say that so far we haven't caught them but there is plenty of time I don't think the school can be expected to do much more

Many strains of headlice are now immune to chemicals, plus I realised I was giving my child a sore head with them all. There is a kit called www.nits.net/products_kit.cfmbug buster which works really well. Combing, combing, more combing. I find that if my dd gets an outbreak, that if I comb every second day for a week, then about 5 days later and a week later again, that it clears the entire problem. Time consuming, but cheap and the only thing that seems to work.

The school do nothing and don't seem to be allowed to, although for those families (and I'm afraid everyone in the school seems to know who they are) who don't bother checking/ treating their kids; I think the district nurse should be called or something.

The poor kids. You see them there scratching their little heads raw and all the kids know what's wrong and laugh at them.

I think it is unfair not to have a word with the parent(s) who do not deal with their child's unfortunate infestation(for want of a better word) because my child hates being checked but I do it regularly and then again have thorough extra checks when I have been warned that it is going around, purely because the thought of having to deal with a bad outbreak feels me with dread because it takes so long just to check never mind getting rid of them! If it is no longer a bad thing why can't it be dealt with openly?

Nitty Gritty/other repellents anyone use those with success?

Sorry, link www.nits.net/products_kit.cfm

Can't seem to get the html to work.

fills! not feels me with dread! Am now itching!!!!!!!

sorry for getting you all itching!!! if it was once a term problem i wouldnt be so stressed but it seriously is once a month and a letter coming home every week - some parents are threatening to take their children to a different school which is silly because the school itself is a good stable school. at least i have a boy with relatively short hair and is blond so i can easily spot visitors but if i had a girl with long hair (and they do keep it plaited and up) i would be livid!!!!

ds schoold send out a news letter once every few months to remember parents to check and not to send them in until they have been treated

Our school does nothing at all.

I want to suggest that they send out an 'awareness' letter - and encourage peopole to have a simultaneous 'bug busting w/e or half term. To tell everyone a couple of weeks in advance, including that you can get nitty-gritty combs on prescription, with tips on how to get rid of them.

The problem with excluding children with lice is that the school would have to check all the kids every day, because only the conscientious / observant / experienced parents would recognise lice soon enough to stop them being passed on, or to notice at all, AND agree to keep their child off school. I won't be taking a morning off work to de-louse my child when he will go straight back into school and put his head up against someone less conscientious!

Blu, have you seen this website? There's a national bug busting day coming up on 31st October, but I suspect other crawly things may be more on most people's minds that day. I suspect only the conscientious will participate, but good luck anyway!

Aha! Thanks for that Hallegerda - I will take it into school and see if they would at least put it in the newsletter!

DD's teacher sent yet another letter out recently informing everyone that lice were about. But he also told the kids that their parents MUST check for lice THAT EVENING. DD was adamant that I had to even though I'd already checked them 2 nights before. So perhaps that's one way - to make the children badger their parents?

Still don't think it's one to exclude pupils from school though...

I tried to set up a meeting at a previous school, so a group parents could get together one evening and discuss the best plan of action to try and deal with the problem and put a lasting "action plan" in place. Put a note in the newsletter and didn't get a solitary response. Seems I was the only one who cared!

I am beginning to think that the only solution is to have hair net things (like they use in the food industry) as part of primary school uniform. It's becoming ridiculous. The other alternative is to comb every other night until they leave primary. As you can get rid of them only to get them back not long after and if you leave it a few days then you're back at square one with eggs. With 5 girls it's an absolute nightmare and really eats into our time with all the combing.