There’s a nasty four-letter word being used ad nauseam at my daughter’s elementary school.
L-I-C-E!
Just looking at the word makes my head itch.
Thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, on-my-knees-with-gratitude, thankfully, my daughter passed the all-school scalp check and was sent home with a two-page letter from the city health department rather than a head full of nits.
Unfortunately, more than a dozen other kids at the school were not as fortunate.
Still, it’s not like the lice-free kids should be bragging about their good luck because thanks to a new school policy, which was recently instituted by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), it may just be a matter of time before they need to be deloused too.
Apparently, the AAP did research and found that keeping kids with active lice infestations at home instead of sending them to school creates more drama than necessary, since the tiny bugs are more of a nuisance than a health hazard.
“It makes no medical sense to keep kids home because the nits… they’re really stuck on the kid’s hair,” Dr. Barbara Frankowski, an AAP researcher told news reporters. “It just sort of increases the hysteria and it makes kids miss school unnecessarily.”
The AAP may have science on its side, but that means little to many of the parents whose children attend my daughter’s school. In fact, in the days since the lice letter was sent out, the majority of the kids staying home were lice-free, and their parents wanted them to stay that way.
I refuse to quarantine my lice-free kid. Still, I don’t blame other parents for exercising their right to keep their kids far, far away from possible exposure.
The school, on the other hand, is irate that some moms and dads would even consider pulling their kids from class in order to protect them from head lice.
What would you do? Should kids with lice be allowed to stay in class?
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