I’d just like to interject to say that every single head lice inspection nurse in every school I ever attended was always known as Nitty Nora.
<second hand information> here the policy is that the child can return to school if they bring in proof of treatment - like the box or the box top of the treatment.
Number Six - Is it not neglect then? I assume if it was the nurse in your first story would have reported the mother to the proper authorities?
Does anyone wonder who is in control in that house???
I bought a kit to have at home for just in case. Niether of my kids have had head lice. My duaghters class doesn’t seem to have a problem. In fact, I can’t remember getting even one notice from her teacher.
GAH. 
My head itches just to think about it.
THANKS A BUNCH… sigh
I work with kids, and yeah, I’ve had students with lice in the past - Argh - treated everyone and the whole household to go with it, just in case.
My mom teaches in an elementary school, and they have a mom volunteer there who is the leader of the Lice Brigade. Apparently some shampoos you can only use once or twice before it becomes dangerous to use again or something. This lady uses mayo (yes, mayo) and/or shortening in wet hair to comb out nits. It seems to work…
Mom had a kid in her class a few years ago who kept coming back with lice. Apparently the mother hadn’t figured out she needed to clean up the rest of the place, not just the kid’s head…
Ugh. Lice.
Now I itch like mad.
AAAARGH!
My daughter had them twice. I can’t remeber how we found out the first time, but I remember going to the drugstore and not being able to find the RID. So I went and stood in line at the pharmacy and asked the clerk where to find it…and the people in line behind me stepped back away from me! Talk about a visceral reaction!
The second time, I knew exactly how she got them…we had been to an antique store and she had tried on several hats. That time I knew where the stuff was kept (by the dandruff shampoo, if you need to know) and I didn’t have to scare any other customers. We had gone to so many antique shops that day I couldn’t remember which one had the hats, so I couldn’t call and warn them.
Fortunately it cleared up both times after just the one treatment,
OK, if a kid keeps turning up week after week with head lice, the parent is obviously being negligent. OK, the little buggers can be hard to kill, but you keep trying (I’ve heard of people using every lice killer known to man to no avail, then having success by smothering them with mayonnaise or olive oil, or by using an essential oil to kill them. Lavender, manuka, and tea tree oils are supposed to be very good.)
BTW, you ought to try taking a pathology class sometime.
During skin pathologies week, which was when lice and crabs became the soup de jour, the whole class squirmend and scratched during the whole lecture.
My scalp is itching right now, just from reading this thread.
Even when the parents know how to get rid of the lice, they often don’t know that they also have to clean the pillows, sofas, chairs, or whatever else that kids hair has come in contact with. Also the parents don’t realize they have lice sometimes and scrub the kids head with Rid but don’t bother to do their own. I think the best thing to do is first make an information sheet about how to get rid of lice completely, including out of upholstery and carpet, and have the nurse or teacher distribute that. If that still doesn’t do it, then I would take some more action to pressure the school into confronting this parent, perhaps involving Social Services.
Another interesting fact, lice don’t like dirty hair. They actually prefer clean hair, so the stereotype that only the poor dirty kids get lice is completely wrong. In fact if your daughters use a lot of hair spray or gel, they are much less likely to get lice.
Cite? My wife is a school nurse and this is the first time I’ve heard this.
My daughter came back one Sunday night after spending the weekend with her father and the next morning she got up for school and when we got to the sitters house (my husband’s aunt is our sitter) my daughter was complaining about her head itching. She had lice out the wazoo!! I called my ex husband and told him that he brought her back home to me with lice and I told him how to clean his house to get rid of them.
I called the school and told them she wouldn’t be there that day and then I went to the store and bought a big bottle of RID shampoo and a bottle of the RID spray too. It took me 3 1/2 hours to wash and comb through her hair. Her hair was long too… down to the middle of her back! Talk about tedious. After getting her hair cleaned up she stayed at the sitter’s house and I went home and started on the laundry. I washed all the bedding in my house… my daughter’s my son’s and mine. I also washed all the coats, the clothes in their hamper or on their floor, and all the towels. I put pillows in the dryer on high for 30 minutes and I sprayed their mattresses and our couches/chairs and curtains with the RID spray. I also sprayed down the carpet and vacuumed it really well too. Took me all day to get it done. I took her back to the school and they checked her over and said it looked as if I had gotten them all. I still checked her hair every single night after that for a month. I also put a few drops of tea tree oil in our shampoo and we haven’t had any problems since.
Maybe if you bought a bottle of the RID shampoo and mailed it to her along with instructions on how to clean her house she would get the hint! Being a single parent has nothing to do with this IMO. My husband was in Iraq when my daughter got lice last year so I was a single parent during that time. I had a full time job and still managed to take care of two kids and a house and I managed to delouse my daughter and my house in one day and never have the problem reoccur. I think you should also complain to the school about this child having lice for such a long time. If the nurse won’t do anything about it then talke to the principal. If the principal won’t do anything about it then go to the superintendent. No way in hell should this child be allowed to come to school infested with lice like that.
It’s what my kids school nurse told me. The bad thing is that it’s often associated with the dirty kids. I see Harmless found one link, here are a couple others.
http://vtvt.essortment.com/headlicelouse_rfmf.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/conditions/head_lice_child.shtml
Just a thought, but the products you have to get for this, she might not be able to afford. Being a single mom myself. I have been there before when there wasn’t enough money and I had to ask someone for help. I am hoping that is true that she can’t afford it, and is not nelgecting her child. It’s hard to ask for help sometimes.
Hotlining Mom to report suspicions of neglect would have been the next step.
I didn’t know what head lice looked like, but I found these helpful pictures.
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/wq/nonpoint/upest/images/lice.jpg
Here in Scott county (Iowa) they don’t even send the children home anymore. And they will not tell you names of students who have had them.
They run the Robi comb through their hair and send them back to class and send a note home telling the parents they were treated and to treat them at home and not send them back until you try two of the suggestions on the list.
You check off what you did to treat your child, sign it and send it back.
How many people do you think just mark it and send it back?
My oldest daughter brought them home and we had a fit with the school. We spent alot of money trying to get rid of them and I kept asking the teacher to move her desk and I was told that wasn’t the cause that it was something in our house.
Five children and four adults in our house and my only one person has them?
I got the Robi comb and put tree tea oil in the shampoo. They tell you not to pre-treat everyone else since the little buggers are building an intolerance to the insecticides.
A friend of mine from New Zealand told me about using the tea tree oil, or a rose water rinse.
The comb you have to use every day.
We washed everything! Steam cleaned the beds, carpets and cars.
Persephone started a thread about it once somewhere around here. Lots of ideas popped up in that thread about things to use and commonly missed items that didn’t get washed.
IIRC cars are often forgotten along with stuffed animals. For toddlers don’t forget carseats.
If this is a single mother with a low income their are perscriptions that she can get even on a medical card. That means she wouldn’t have to spend money, just her time.
When I did my daughters hair I lit a candle and tossed the nits in there. It gave me a perverse pleasure to hear them sizzle!
The tea tree oil leaves a fine sheen of oil on the hair making it harder for the glue of the nits to stick. It also makes the scalp an uninhabitable environment. If you are going to use this, use only a few drops as it can burn a bit if it’s too strong. And it doesn’t smell the best.
Maybe you and/or a few of the other concerned parents can collect some of the stuff and leave it in her mail box or on her doorstep? Maybe the nurse can tuck the care package in her backpack?
I did eventually get them to move my daughters desk and we didn’t have any more issues. Not sure if it was a coincedence or not but I’m not going to question it.
I don’t know how far from the Quad Cities you are, but I’ve got tea tree oil if you need it. Otherwise you can pick it up fairly cheap anywhere.
Good luck.
Am I the only one thinking that after an entire school year of infestation, screw sending a care package of RID, this mother is reported to child protection before I do another thing in life?
9 months of parasites living on her child. If that isn’t neglect of the most disgraceful, disgusting and utterly avoidable kind, I don’t know what is. Screw neighborly kindness, get the pros involved. There’s more going on here than inability to kill a persistent case of nits.
I didn’t mean to suggest this would be your responsibility. I don’t think I would do it for someone I didn’t know. I’m just suggesting that this may be the reason it hasn’t been taken care of. Maybe she doesn’t have anyone to turn to for help. In which case, I would think the health dept might be able to offer some assistance in this area.
And yes, I have the heebie-jeebies just thinking about this. Eeewww…
Okay, my family fought against these nasty little fuckers for Three. Goddamned. Years. Every time Tark’s kids would go visit their mother, they’d come back with lice - and it took an Act of Gawrd to get rid of them each time. However, to the outside world, I’m sure it looked like we were horribly neglectful and didn’t give a shit about the three kids itching constantly and being covered with bugs.
NIX didn’t work. RID didn’t work. We vacuumed. We washed. We sealed stuffed animals in garbage bags and LEFT them there. We combed and combed and combed and combed. We finally had to get a prescription for Lindane to get them out of the house completely (this was back in 1995).
Then in 2000, my oldest kid picked them up. We’d already had experience with RID and NIX, so no freaking thank you.
P_T_ up there mentioned mayonnaise. That’s what finally worked for us. We washed their sheets, scrubbed their animals, and then coated their heads in mayonnaise and put shower caps over it and let them sleep in it. The lice were gone, the nits never hatched, and the kids’ hair was all smooth and manageable. 
As a side note - those pictures of nits to which neuroman linked don’t really convey the sheer skeevy “ew omgomgomg GROSS AAAAHHHH!!!” feeling of actually seeing them teem across someone’s scalp.
(During that last bout I got them too - I got rid of them by trying something a hairdresser told me - coating my hair in Vaseline. It got rid of the nits. It also took three weeks to come completely out of my hair. I don’t recommend it unless we’re talking LAST RESORT.)
Glad I was not eating while readin this thread. However, I find myself wondering, why is it primarily young, primary school kids who get this? Or so it seems, anyway. I mean, I recall regular inspections in primary school, but not after that.
Is this a completely erroneous perception on my part, or what? Plus, you’d sort of think that if one kid pnce picked up fleas, for instance, from a pet (or indeed a stray dog, should that not also spread to the others in the class?
This does sound like a horrible situation though. At the very least, that poor kid’s education is suffering, I should think. Plus the nasty “teasing” from the other kids… 
Okay, here’s how we’ve handled them: some time ago (about 2 years?), my oldest daughter contracted them from a friend at a sleepover; before we knew anything was wrong, she passed it along to her two younger sisters (11 and 2 at the time). We tried RID and Nix, with very limited success. Then we tried the prescription stuff; no joy there, either. Finally, I found out about a comb called The LiceMeister. A school nurse told me that it’s way better than other lice combs. The LiceMeister site advises non-medical removal. What you have to do is comb the child’s hair (with this comb) twice a day, once in the morning, once at night, for two weeks. This disrupts the life cycle. It gets all the live ones out in the first couple of combings, so the child can return to school. Then, any nits you might miss hatch, and are combed out as tiny babies before they get a chance to lay more eggs. After the two weeks (during which you still have to vacuum/dryer treat all bedding, furniture, carpets, clothing, etc.), you start combing with this comb every two weeks, so that if you have another infestation, you find it very quickly, which is much easier to treat than if it really gets rolling. My little one is in pre-K now, and doing my twice-monthly combing of her hair a few weeks ago, I found one. Only one, and it was an adult. No nits or anything. I called the school, and the nurse said she must have picked one up from a classmate, and suggested that I comb her every day for a few days, but if I didn’t find any more critters or nits for four consecutive days, and didn’t notice any itching, then all was well. All is well, but boy am I glad I’m doing that regular screening now! Sure saved me a lot of trouble. I washed her bedding and vacuumed the furniture, too, just to be on the safe side.
Treatment with this comb doesn’t take that long when you get the hang of it. My middle daughter has really long, extremely thick, curly hair, and I got to where I could comb her out in 15 minutes (I did use quite a bit of detangling spray). If anyone’s interested in details of the regimen, post here or email me, and I’ll share.