Schools and head lice

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Every week we get a note home from the nurse’s office. Every week it’s the same thing, a case of head lice is being reported in the class. According to the school hand book, the child should be sent home. They quit sending the kid home at the beginning of the school year. Every week she is checked by the nurse, and every week the nurse sends out an alert.

To the parent of said child - CLEAN YOUR KIDS HEAD! Take a little bit of time and effort to rid your child of head lice and your home as well. If you do not know how, ask someone. If you need help, ask for it. It is ridiculous to send your child to school infested with bugs. Do you not realize you are hurting your child? The other kids do not play with her, she is a loner, She spends recess all by herself. I have been to school and spent time with the kids, she is a bright girl, but very shy. I feel bad for her. In second grade kids are starting to be mean to other kids. All the kids in her class know that she is the one with head lice. My son says other kids tease her.

I don’t understand how this can be let go to this extreme. I know the schools employees are mandatory reporters, so evidently they are not seeing signs of physical abuse, but isn’t this neglect?

How does one approach the parent to offer some help? I am sure she has to know that all the other parents know.

2

How about while wearing a motorcycle helmet?
Kidding… I believe I’d get a bottle of whatever the school nurses or a pharmacist recommends and just go to the parent and say “Hey, we’ve had a problem with this in ourt household before and this really worked for us.” Even if you’ve not, it’ll still help remove any stigma and hopefully lessen their embarassment by suggesting that it can happen to anybody.

I know it’s not going to be a “fun” encounter but obviously whatever’s happened to date isn’t providing them with a sufficient amout of stimulus. Sorry you’re stuck with this. It never should have had to reach this point.

3

Have you spoke with the head people there?
Maybe the principal should be taking a harder stance.
As per this website

Maybe print that out, take it to the big guys and ask what sort of policy that school has.

4

I am pretty sure that won’t do the trick all by itself. Basically, once you have lice you really pretty much have to deep clean the entire house including bedding, clothes any upholstery and so forth.

5

I had lice once.

Even if they weren’t contagious, that kid needs treatment. Lice are awful to have. I second the “this stuff worked for us” idea.

6

Good idea, harmless, but you seem to have stumbled across a document regarding Victoria (Australia) not Iowa (USA). At least, that’s my guess based on the (http://vic.gov.au/index.jsp). Even so, I would expect Iowa would have similar requirements …

7

I wonder if this parent might be 1) single, 2) overwhelmed, and 3) needs help. She may have no time to completely de-bug her home, so the kid keeps picking them up again. Maybe she needs someone to take the kid(s) while she strips all the beds and launders the entire house.

It took having my own kid to understand why my mother came unglued if I ever wore another kid’s hat!!!

8

My pharmacy had a fact sheet out awhile ago on head lice. Turns out that lice are becoming increasingly more resistant to conventional treatments, and they are having to turn to stronger stuff. So, some kids might be getting treated, but the shampoo/gel/whatever they are using just isn’t doing the job.

9

Ooooohh.
Good catch! I did not notice.
Well, if the dirty Aussies can have such a policy, shouldn’t we pristine Ameries have the same standards? :smiley:

Kidding, Aussies! Don’t send the rabid kangaroos after me, please, cause I’ll have to respond with the rabid chipmunks and then, as we all know, all heck breaks loose! :stuck_out_tongue:

10

Yes, afaik she is a single parent. I am certain if I just popped over and knocked on the door with cleaning supplies she wouldn’t just let me in. I have never been a single parent, so I do not know what its like. I do however know how it feels to overwhelmed. When I want to do deep cleaning uninterupted I send the kids off for the day, either to grandma’s house or the babysitter.

I live in a different town ( we open enroll our kids ) than the school, so I have never socially interacted with her. I would be willing to roll up my sleeves and get to scrubbing if I thought it would help this child.

does anyone else feel thier skin begin to crawl when they talk about head lice?

11

YES!
I’ve had it twice.
Once in elementary school and once in high school.
In elementary school, my younger brother and sister (twins) got it from their classmates and then, as we are all taught, came home and shared it with the rest of us. :smiley:

In high school, I got it from sleeping over at my friend’s house.
Nastiest house EVER!!
I don’t know why it didn’t leap into my mind in bold print at the time as the source, but the day after I found I had it, I was “playing” with her hair at school and there were little lice houses and communities and I think some were even rallying a protest for cleaner living conditions. :rolleyes:
I was extremely discreet with her about it, didn’t mention the fact that I was going to pretty much have to shave my head because of her, and informed her of a little product called RID.

12

Feel my skin crawl? Understatement of the year. There are few things that give me the screaming mimi’s, and you just hit on one of them. The very thought of having head lice makes me want to puke.

That poor girl. She’s had lice since the beginning of the school year, so that’s…oh, god- nine months…

In my Junior year of high school there was a girl who had head lice so bad that she had to shave her head. My sister caught it from her (they shared a class but were not friends) and brought them home.

One day after a particularly bad holiday season I felt something scrambling around on my head. I’m 17, and I have head lice. After trying to convince my mom of this for an evening, I sat down and scratched around until I caught one (oh, god I feel sick…) and showed it to her. I even pulled out the encyclopedia to find a picture of one to make sure. What does she do? Sigh, throw up her hands and gave me a 20 to go to K-mart to get the killum stuff.

I told my sister what had happened that that I wanted to have a look at her head.

She was CRAWLING with them. Big, fat, at least a cm long lice. That girls head would have kept a chimp happy for MONTHS. She told me that her head had been itchy, but she had not thought anything of it. UGH.

So I bought the stuff- shampoo, combs, gel, sprays…what ever the store had to make sure I could make the little fuckers die die die. I washed everything in the house on hot, sprayed the mattresses with stuff until the cloth was soaked, scrubbed and combed myself, thanked the whatever’s that we had tile instead of carpet, ect. Then I turned to my family.

Mom and my step-dad were clean. My sister, as mentioned before, was NOT. She had hair that was quite long, and each and every strand had at least 5 nits on it. It was impossible to comb them all out with her hair that long, so after shampooing her hair I cut it. She looks nice in a bob.

Apparently the killum stuff is only partially effective. Some lice die, others are just stunned. Combing out her hair took so long that some of the ones that were only stunned started to revive. One of these fell onto the waistband of her jeans and started to CRAWL BACK UP. That’s when I started dropping every louse and nit into a bowl of hot soapy water.

I hope you are able to do something for that girl, and I commend you for it. Is it possible that the child has ducked her mother’s notice on this? As a single mom I know it can be hard. If not, maybe there is a serious neglect problem going on and Social Services needs calling…as a last resort, that is. I’d definitely try contacting her politely and offering your services first. If I was out in your area, I’d offer to go with you as scrubbing crew.

Good Luck.

13

Lice may be getting more resistant to chemical treatments - but the best way to keep the buggers at bay is brushing your hair thoroughly every day. My mother works with a lot of kids from, ummmm, disadvantaged households, and the first thing she does each evening is brush-brush-brush-brush…

14

Papaveraceae, For some reason your post has me thoroughly skeeved.

15

It is true that lice are becoming resistant to the treatments, but here in the UK, rather than turning to the stronger stuff, the range and strength of effective chemicals has been steadily reduced over time. Head lice are a really common problem in primary schools and I think I’m right in saying that the school can’t do much about it; apparently they aren’t allowed to inspect the kids and even if they were, they aren’t allowed to single out any individual and recommend treatment; as a result, if one kid gets lice, they all do.

My daughter has had them at least twice and there was a time when I had to comb her hair every day with a Robicomb as soon as she got home and every day, I would find and remove a number of fully-grown adult lice (hardly ever any little ones, just the big mamas, which she had obviously picked up during the day.

Those couple of times she actually got a full-blown case of them, with eggs and smaller lice present, we tried insecticidal mousses and shampoos, but they just plain didn’t work - after the treatment was complete, we were supposed to just find dead lice, but we’d find perfectly happy living, crawling ones.

The only thing that worked was daily hair washing, followed by conditioning (using about three times the recommended amount of ordinary hair conditioner), which would then be combed out with a fine-tooth comb. After rinsing and fully drying, we’d go over with the Robicomb too (which was also effective).

It is a war of attrition.

16

Ack! That’s awful. mangetout - at my local school system, part of the teacher’s job is to (ugh) inspect the kids’ hair for lice. If they have them, they aren’t supposed to return to school until they can prove they’ve gotten rid of them. However, as many people have mentioned, it’s not enough just to to the hair.

I had a co-worker who was having to remove her child from school every two weeks or so because of lice. This co-worker spent money out the wazoo for products, washed bedding, scrubbed every inch of her house. Unfortunately, her kid sat next to a child that had a known lice problem. Whatever that family was doing, it wasn’t enough. Like a little Typhoid Licey, that child kept sharing her tiny gifts with the children that sat in front and behind her. My co-worker asked to have her child moved, but apparently the school wouldn’t do it. I don’t think it got better until the end of the school year.

Once my niece came home from school with a note about lice. The whole family treated themselves, even though only my niece and sister had them. It was Thanksgiving and we told my second-grade niece that this was what the pilgrims did. :smiley:

StG

17

Someone gave me a coat last fall and my head started itching.
My dr. said it was a reaction to the material and gave me some steroid cream.
So when it kept getting worse, I just figured it wasn’t effective.
Til I was reading and 2 fell OUT onto my BOOK.

I called the dr. and they told me what to buy.
My son got them too.

It took 4 uses of the stuff (10$ a bottle), laundry every 2 days(20$) and spraying the mattress.
10 days later, all were gone.
I have long hair(to my breasts) and didn’t have to cut it.

18

At the school district where I work, a child who has been sent home will not be allowed back into the school unless they pass inspection. I had one little girl a few years back who would miss two or three weeks at a time before being allowed to come back to class. Then a month later, she’d be home again. It was bad enough that the school nurse eventually went to the girl’s house with a couple of her aides and personally deloused all of the children and sterilized the house. Mom had been treating the kids haphazardly (boys got their heads shaved, girls got treated when mom felt like it), and never did anything to the house. It was a shame, because she was a bright girl, enthusastic about learning, and liked school, but painfully shy, and she fell quite a bit behind the others due to her constant absenses.

In another case, a boy kept getting sent home, but he was getting deloused and the house thoroughly cleansed, or so it was thought. Mom had apparently neglected the section in the pamphlet given to parents about treating stuffed animals, and the child had been reinfected by the bear he slept with each time.

19

What happens if you don’t treat them? Wouldn’t your scalp become infected from all the bites? UGH! My scalp is itching just thinking about it! I never had it, but a girl in my neighborhood did (that I was friends with) so my parents and the parents of my other friends all treated our heads with the RID type of shampoos. Thank heavens we didn’t get it. And that stuff stank, too!

I read on that Taking Children Seriously site about a kid who refused to let his parents treat him for lice so they just kept getting it over again. I was so freaking grossed out.

20

We had a number of arguments with my daughter about the lice - she was understandably fed up with the uncomfortable treatment regime and tried to persuade me to stop.

I got my microscope out.

She changed her mind.