I am a member of the lice brigade at my kid’s school. We check the heads of all the kids in school after any vacation longer than a three day weekend. We all stand in the teacher’s lounge, which has a large table, they come in in groups of about ten at a time and so it goes until we are done. The preschoolers are done by two vother volunteers in a different room, because of the wiggle factor of ten preschoolers in one place. We have a UV light thingie to shine on their heads in case of uncertinty, looks like a little laser show if the child has lice.
Interestingly, no one ever checked the teachers until one of them came in and plunked herself down one day. Thereafter all the teachers and sides coem in too.
The main actions of the school are preventative – for instance, all the kids have to use lice capes on their jacket hooks, which are like plastic bags covering the jacket. Hats and scarves and gloves go under the cape. They have lessons nwo and again on how not to spread lice and so on.
When a kid has lice, though, all the other kids know it immediately, because they are in the room. A letter goes to the parents of the kids who have lice explaining how to treat it and prevent its spread and what to do with your textiles and so on – here the advice is to put bedding and toys and so on in a garbage bag and set it out of doors, which is differnt from when I was young and they said to wash it all in hot water with bleach as I recall. The info is written by the agency which handles youth health in the area. A letter also goes out to the rest of the class saying that lice was found in the class and how to check for them and what to look for.
Around here they don’t care what treatment you use, they say at the agency that the most effective approach is in fact combing and not the shampoos. Whether the child comes to school the next day depends on the parents, I have never heard of a child excluded from school for lice though I suppose it could happen. There was a child whose parents just for whatever reason didn’t get with the program and also refused permission to have the child’s head checked. This was handled by many, many meetings with the parents in an effort to persuade them of the error of their ways. (this last appears to me, as a foreigner, to be a hallmark of the Dutch approach to many things, which is based in a consensus notion of resolving problems – they assume you will get with the program. If you fail to do so, you get a meeting with, say, the teacher in an effort to explain the program. Followed by the principal, the health care professional assigned to the school, her boss, and I assume ending with the Dutch version of Family and Children’s Services as necessary.)
However, they are most forthright about the fact of somebody being infested.