Schools closing as virus spreads

CHICAGO (AP) — The number of students staying home sick with the flu is multiplying nationwide, and normally quiet school nurses’ offices suddenly look like big-city emergency rooms, packed with students too ill to finish the day.

The federal government has urged schools to close because of the H1N1 flu only as a last resort. But schools are closing by the dozens as officials say they are being hit so hard and so fast by the virus that shutting down for a few days is the only feasible option.

“There was nothing else we could do,” said Michael Frechette, the superintendent of Connecticut’s Middletown Public Schools, where a middle school closed for the week after 120 students stayed home sick Monday and 25 were sent home by noon.

“The only way to stop that transmittal was to keep the kids home for the rest of the week.”

At least 351 schools were closed last week — affecting 126,000 students in 19 states, according to the U.S. Education Department. So far this school year, about 600 schools have temporarily shut their doors.

Several schools in Nebraska and Iowa have been closed because of illnesses, including Wauneta-Palisade in southwest Nebraska, Crawford in northwest Nebraska and St. Joseph Catholic School in Des Moines.

The number of closures this school year appears on target to surpass the roughly 700 schools closed last spring when the outbreak first hit.

“This is scary,” said Kathryn Marchuk, a nurse whose son attends St. Charles East High School outside Chicago, which closed for three days last week after about 800 of its 2,200 students called in sick.

“So many people are sick. It’s just everywhere.”

Many school officials said they were afraid that the virus, also known as swine flu, would spread faster if they stayed open.

“Students are in such close proximity (to each other) and they’re in two or three classrooms a day at two or three different desks,” said Donna Lovell, director of pupil personnel for Berea Community Schools in Kentucky, which closed for four days last week after 20 percent of its students called in sick.

“It’s an incubator situation.”

Whether closing schools is effective is debatable, with some experts saying that the tactic merely spreads the number of cases over a longer time.

But school officials like Frechette disagree, saying students who get sick this week at home cannot infect nearly as many people as they would if they were in school.

“Nobody’s at school, so they’re not infecting each other,” he said. Besides, he said, “kids are dying, (and) it’s just four days.”