Yea..because you can search kids for being sick/germs.

#2 what?

Baptize them with holy sanitizer every time you enter the classroom.

Unfortunately, there's no vaccine for pink eye (viral or bacterial), or scabies (ugh, body lice). I call kids "germinators". Never had strep throat, got it when I worked as summer camp nurse. Didn't know I had it, was masked by coughing from whooping cough that some kid have me about a month before. Yeah, kids are cute..... little disease spreaders. Sorry OP, keep bleach solution in room and spray everything they look at

frequent hand washing for OP and the children is the best way to stop the spread of infections.

It's unhealthy to jump to conclusions.

I thought she was running.

Monsters Inc. had it right all along...

Circle circle dot dot

Now you've had a cootie shot!

They might not be aware of it yet? Kids are a petri dish for all kinds of nasty things.

I know they often carry a lot of germs, but maybe parents should pay more attention to their kids. It's common knowledge that they get sick often, and with that in mind they should keep an eye out. (No pun intended) pink eye is common in kids and the symptoms shouldn't go unnoticed. As for scabies, it's more understanding to not know yet.

There are a lot of parents who really don't care, or are just ignorant, and will send their kid just because they can function enough to walk and talk. I was sent with Chickenpox. Surprise surprise, half of my class got them after I was finally quarantined. My mother thought I had zits. All of my body. At the age of 6. Even yelled at me for being unclean enough to get so many zits overnight at a young age. Idiot...

#10 I take it you haven't been around elementary school kids much. Trust me when I say you can send em to school healthy and they come home with the flu. It's going to happen no matter how careful you are. That's why they give recruits peanut butter shots in the first 2 days of boot camp. When you bring a bunch of people who have never interacted before together, you're going to end up with a lot of nasty "cooties" floating around. No matter how careful you are.

"Cape May Crud" yep I had it in boot camp.

Petri dish for pink eye? Absolutely. But scabies? That's a problem

Actually #23 scabies is very hard to detect before your skin looks like a war zone and can spread way before it's detected. For all intents and purposes pink eye is harder to transmit.

Mandatory attendance, perhaps? If your child misses too many days without a legitimate reason, then you get fined and possibly other legal consequences. Sometimes you have doctors that upon hearing you have a child with chicken pox says that they're not allowed to come to the office because they don't want the child infecting other patients. Some schools only accept official absences (doctor's notes, government officiated). My elementary school tried to get someone's parents in trouble because the kid was always sick. They stopped when the kid came to school with visible chicken pox. How many people go to work or school with flu or other contagious illnesses? The world doesn't stop because a person is sick.

14, there are some parents who will their children around others with chicken pox so they catch it at a young age. Maybe your mom was just helping half your class.

Hopefully that will no longer be an issue since there's a chicken pox vaccine.

29, my sister was sick all the time as a littler kid. She has asthma, food allergies, lung tumor, air allergies, tubes in her ears, always got everything that was going around. E. coli, salmonella, all kinds of stuff. The school tried to get my mom in trouble too. Eventually she just had to tell them to do whatever they were going to do, but there's no way my sister was going to school. That's the American school system though. In Sweden, jobs let you stay home until you're better and stay home with your kids when they're sick. I like Sweden. Lol. I wish the U.S. would be more understanding, especially in special cases.

If you miss more than seven days at my school, you fail. They also do not excuse absences, even if you have a doctor's note.

Sadly, I'm sure there are also a few parents that will send a sick child to school because they, themselves can't take the a day off work to stay home to watch him/her. Since the OP is an elementary teacher, those kids are usually too young to be at home alone.

Because sickness doesn't always strike first thing in the morning. When I was a kid I got pink eye, but didn't realize it until lunchtime because I wasn't showing any symptoms before then. My teacher was the first to notice, and she called my mom, who would never have sent me to school that day if she had realized I had pink eye. It's not always the parents' fault.

That's something my parents would do to me to be honest...They'd send me to school with Pink Eye...In fact I think they DID send me to school when I caught it for the first time.

Sadly true :(

*FML is glitchy now, ignore my comments...*

Well you don't get scabies from bad hygiene. It just takes contact with an infected person. Scabies is caused by parasites who are pretty tough : they die at 80 degrees celsius and soap just feeds them. Getting rid of home infestation is really hard : you have to buy expensive killer spray, special soap, do a crapload of laundry, and you have do it ALL AT ONCE because the little bastards can live in any kind of cloth for 3 days without eating. So no, having bad hygiene doesn't matter here. Being poor or having a lot of work however means you can keep your new little pets around for a looooong time.

...has made a grave tactical error. I am 100% sure that's how it goes.