Disease Spread In the Classroom
Pt 2 -- Back-to-School
Back-to-school season is in full swing.
Many students (K-12 and college) are already back in the classroom. Some students, like mine, do not go back until after the county fair has concluded in a couple of weeks (seriously, county fairs are a big deal and as a city girl, I just don’t understand). Regardless of the date of the first day of school, school is about to start!
Back-to-school marks the beginning of a new year. A fresh start. A new beginning.
And with that in mind, I’m writing a back-to-school series this week.
Five posts.
All focused on the ties between back-to-school season and community health.
Yesterday’s post focused on pandemic learning loss.
Today is all about disease spread in the classroom.
Future posts will cover preventive care, mental health, and safety. Be sure you are subscribed so you don’t miss one…
Hoping this post helps to educate and empower you
to be healthy and create healthy classrooms & communities.
Let’s start with a simple math question —
The answer is obvious…
Diseases spread from person to person.
And I’m not zeroing in on the spread of COVID.
Yucky things spread, too. Like lice and pink eye.
There’s also ringworm and athlete’s foot.
When humans gather and spend time together — in a classroom, locker room, dorm, bathroom, or cafeteria — the potential for disease spread increases.
Long before the pandemic, back-to-school season was associated with an increase in illnesses. Kids who haven’t been together for several months come together and spend a lot of time together. They share meals, work together at small tables, frequent the bathroom together, study together in the library (or a local coffee shop), and sit together on the bus to/from school.
Germs are spread through the air, through skin-to-skin contact, on surfaces, when hands are not washed properly, and when someone sneezes.
Here’s the back-to-school reality — your kids are going to get sick.
You will probably get sick, too.
Viral infections — like COVID, flu, RSV, mono, stomach bugs (rotavirus/norovirus), and the common cold — are going to spread.
Bacterial infections, like strep throat, will spread.
And there will be lice and pink eye; ringworm and hand, foot, and mouth disease.
When we come together at school — diseases will spread.
What can we do?
Step #1 — Acknowledge that kids are going to get sick (adults, too).
Step #2 — Have a sick plan. Every family should have a sick plan — who needs to be contacted when a kid is sick, who is going to stay home with the sick kid, who is going to call the doctor. If you’re a teacher, how do you communicate with your principal? teaching partners? students? Do you need to talk to friends who may have been exposed to your illness? Are medications needed? Who do you call for advice? Who can you call to make a quick trip to the store for you? How can you keep your sick kid away from your (currently) healthy kid? All of these questions should be answered before someone gets sick. Plan NOW.
Step #3 — Stay home.
This is the hardest one for me. And it took a pandemic for me to realize that teaching with pneumonia (just as an example, not saying I did this in the fall of 2014) is a bad idea. It is terrible for my health. I’m spreading disease to others. And I am a downright lousy teacher when I have a fever, wicked cough, and trouble breathing.
We ALL need to agree that staying home when sick is best for us — as we need to rest and recover. And staying home is also best for others. We stop/slow the chain of disease transmission when we isolate ourselves from others.
So stay home.
A general rule of thumb — stay home (or keep your kids home) if they are running a fever (>100.4*F), have diarrhea, are vomiting, have untreated lice, or have a sore throat, cough, pink eyes, or nasty runny nose. And we should all stay home until our symptoms have been gone for 24 hours without symptoms.
Step #4 — Teach & practice good hygiene. Simple acts like washing your hands (after using the bathroom and before eating) and sneezing into an elbow really do reduce the risk of disease spread. We need to teach these behaviors to our kids and practice them before returning to school. Other things we can do to prevent disease spread include, keeping our hands out of our eyes, noses, and mouths (this means NOT biting our nails) and refusing to share water bottles and utensils with others.
Diseases spread in our communities and classrooms because not everyone stays home when they are sick and not everyone practices good hygiene.
Healthy classrooms and school communities are created when everyone participates in the steps needed to prevent disease spread.
Being healthy must be reimagined as a team sport — where everyone is working toward a shared/common goal (which is to be healthy).
Being healthy must include creating healthy communities.
Just as we teach kids in science classes about the interconnections and relationships between organisms, populations, and communities that make up an ecosystem, we need to reframe our understanding of and conversations about being healthy to include individual health, the health of our friends and families, the health of our communities, and environmental health — our Health(eco)system.
To do my part to slow the spread of all the diseases as we head back to school, I need to be healthy. This starts with prevention — washing my hands, covering my sneezes, and not sharing my water bottle with others. I also need to commit to staying home when I am sick — even when it is inconvenient and even when I have to miss something I have been really looking forward to. But my family and close friends need to be healthy, too. They need to be preventing disease or else I am more likely to become sick. And my community needs to be healthy, too. I need bus drivers, coaches, teachers, cafeteria workers, the other students in my classroom as well as my yoga class, and my neighbors to be healthy, too. And then we all need a healthy environment in which to live. We need access to care, affordable health care, safe places to exercise, safe schools, access to food, clean drinking water, proper sanitation, buildings with adequate air circulation, and so much more…
Our whole health(eco)system needs to be healthy.
My health is intimately tied to your health and yours to mine.
And if we want to decrease the spread of all diseases in our schools and classrooms, we ALL need to take steps to prevent disease spread.
We need to form a social contract — focused on our shared goal of being healthy and decreasing disease spread. This is an agreement between members of our classrooms, schools, and communities that will decrease the spread of all of the diseases, from lice to flu and COVID to ringworm.
We need to talk about working together to be healthy and to create healthy communities with our students, classmates, colleagues, and neighbors. We need to ask our community and school leaders to develop policies and procedures that foster a healthy community for all.
We must acknowledge that —
My health is intimately tied to your health and yours to mine.
And that preventing the spread of disease in our classrooms, schools, and communities will be a team effort.
May this be our motto, a constant reminder, throughout the new school year.
Questions? Need advice on what to include in a classroom or school policy about health communities? Please let me know. Happy to share the policies I use in my classroom.
And be sure to share this with others because
when it comes to health, there is no THEM, only US.
Thank you. Another excellent post!