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St. Michael-Albertville School Board Get Update on Head Lice Concerns

The District 885 School Board heard from district health professional Julie Winkelman after parents expressed concerns about the board's policy on dealing with the little buggers.

If your child’s classmate contracts lice, do you feel you should be notified that there has been a case in the classroom?

That was the hot topic of debate at tonight’s school board meeting, as district health professional Julie Winkelman discussed their recent struggles with parental notification concerns by several parents in the district.  

Winkelman said head lice protocol is lumped in with communicable disease and thus has been treated the same as other communicable diseases, such as strep throat or influenza, for the past 10 years.

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The district’s current practice is to remind parents in regular newsletters to continually check their child’s head because lice are always a possibility. Notifications are not sent out to individual classrooms when there is a single case in that class; rather, there is only one sent out when three or more cases in a single classroom have been reported.

In the past Winkelman said she has had an increasing number of parents expressing displeasure at this policy, saying they feel they ought to know if there is even one case in their child’s classroom. Because of these complaints, Winkelman brought her case to the school board in hopes of getting their support for her policy.

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The American Academy of Pediatrics’ current recommendation says students do not even need to be sent home if they are found to have live lice, Winkelman said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention echoes this recommendation, noting that after live lice has been found on a child they have already been contagious for about three weeks. Neither of these organizations specified their opinion on parental notification, though they do speak of protecting student privacy.

The Minnesota Department of Health is the only body to go against this policy, saying the child should be sent home and also that letters should be sent home to parents with students in the classroom. However, Winkelman noted that this recommendation was established in 2002.

Winkelman said she feels the individual right to privacy supersedes a parent’s right to know. She believes that by notifying the class for one case it makes things easy for classmates, the teacher or parents to identify which student has lice.

“If we’re going to put a students’ individual right to privacy first, then we don’t send letters home for any communicable illness if we have just one,” Winkelman said, though noting that lice is technically not an illness but rather an infestation.

Most board members, with the exception of Carol Steffens, initially expressed some uncertainty about the current practice, either saying they personally would like to know if it was in their child’s classroom or wondering whether a compromise could be reached by alerting the entire grade level if lice is found rather than an individual classroom.

However, Winkelman stood firm in her stance that sending letters home would be an invasion of privacy, even if the child is not named.  

“I approach lice from the perspective of:  It’s always a possibility, it lives in the world, it passes quite easily from child to child and, in fact, I believe it passes more out in the community than in the school system because we have looked at the modes of transmission and tried to eliminate them in school,” Winkelman said.  

Steffens agreed, saying she feels sending a letter out for every lice case just puts parents in a panic mode, usually unnecessarily since Winkelman said it’s rare for multiple cases of lice to spring up in the same classroom.

Board chair Doug Birk noted that, legally speaking, sending general letters out about a case of lice would likely not constitute as invasion or privacy just because people could use deductive reasoning to possibly identify the student, but at the same time he wanted to make sure the district protects health privacy, regardless of what the legal intonations may be.

While the school board ultimately agreed to stand behind the current practice, Birk said a formal written policy should be put into place soon on how to address the issue. Currently the district’s only policy on lice states that a student cannot be in school with live lice but does not say anything about communication with other parents.

“I think you’ve done some excellent documentation here,” Birk said of Winkelman’s research. “I think we have a well-reasoned policy, and I think you have brought a good recommendation. So, you have the consent and recommendation of the board.”

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