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Head lice causes headaches for families and school staff in Volusia County

News-Journal - 10/29/2018

Oct. 28--Earlier this year, Lisa Curley found every parent's nightmare in her Creekside Middle School student's hair: head lice.

"She had a full infestation of lice," said Curley, who went out to get the shampoo designed to kill the insects that night.

By the next day, she was treating her 13-year-old daughter's thick hair, but she quickly realized the lice weren't dying. She took her daughter outside and started combing.

"So four hours later, I went through her hair basically three times, strand by strand, and still that evening I'm finding nits."

Nits are the eggs lice lay that are effectively glued to strands of hair near the scalp. Common practice used to be for schools to have "no-nit" policies, meaning students couldn't return to schools until all the live lice and all the nits were gone.

But that has its drawbacks, which is why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends schools do away with those policies. More often than not, the nits are empty casings, or not likely to hatch because of their placement. And, because of how they're adhered to strands of hair, nits aren't likely to be transferred from person to person.

Additionally, most methods to get rid of lice include a second treatment, nine days after the first. This is designed to kill any new lice that hatched from those nits before they can lay nits of their own.

The goal in schools now is to minimize the amount of class time kids miss from having lice, which don't spread disease or have anything to do with personal hygiene. Anyone can get it.

In Volusia, lice checks for the whole school are a thing of the past. They're not proven to reduce lice in schools, and can lead to unproductive use of time by staff and students.

Now, if a student is found to have live lice, siblings will be checked too and a parent or guardian will be called to pick them up. The students will have to be treated before returning to the classroom, with either over-the-counter or prescription medications, and will be checked in the clinic for live lice before going back to class.

"Some parents think our policy is too stringent, others think it's too lenient," said School Board Chair Linda Cuthbert at an October School Board meeting. The board did not opt to make any changes to the policy.

In Curley's case, getting rid of the lice wasn't as simple as using the shampoo and comb at home. She opted to go to a lice clinic, where professionals treated her daughter, her son and her.

Curley kept her daughter home for two days. Her biggest concern now, after cleaning her whole house and washing all their clothes, is that her daughter will get lice again at school.

"I'm sending her to school and basically sending her back into the nest," Curley said. "I just hope they do something to address it because I don't want to have to go through this again. It's very expensive and time consuming."

For Volusia Schools, the policy is designed to protect the children who have lice from being ostracized.

"It's one of those four-letter words that nobody -- nobody -- wants to hear," board member Carl Persis said. "It's upsetting for the parent, upsetting for the children. (When I was a principal) I always went the route to protect the child from being stigmatized."

Part of that, for the district, includes cutting down on some of the rumors for how to get rid of lice. Parents don't have to have their homes professionally cleaned, or shave their child's head. Smothering lice with mayonnaise, olive oil or butter is not an effective treatment. Parents don't need to fumigate their homes, or even bring in pest control services.

But Curley isn't satisfied with the district's approach.

"We need to go back to being thorough," she said. "It isn't fair to our kids or our families to keep an environment where the problem continues to fester, exposing and re-exposing kids to lice."

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