More about Head Lice

We got the dreaded letter from the school a couple weeks ago. It wasn't the most dreaded letter ("Your child is infested with head lice") but it was the second most dreaded one ("A child in your child's class is infested with head lice"). Iain's hair is pretty long, and we've told him if he gets head lice we are going to cut it really short. I personally do not believe that this constitutes child abuse, but I'm not sure that that's how Iain sees it.

I got out the industrial strength lice comb, which we haven't used since the girls were much younger, and combed him out thoroughly. No bugs, living or dead, but I did find a couple of bits of blue-green stuff that Iain identified as duct tape. ("How did you get duct tape in your hair?") We are still on Level Orange alert, but hopefully have dodged the bullet (or the bugs) this time.

I know everyone has been anxiously awaiting an update on the head lice committee. I couldn't make it to the meeting (it probably conflicted with some other meeting I had to go to), but I have reviewed and commented on the proposed new policy - and we just got the word that it has been approved.

The new policy requires parents to sign something that says they have treated their child before their child can return to school. We hope this will help. We shall see.

Remembering September 11

Seven years ago today, Tom was with the kids at the dentist. He called me and told me that a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. I assumed an accident, and a little plane; he called back not long afterwards to say that a second plane had struck the other tower. It wasn't long afterwards that I remember seeing the first tower collapse, on the television screen in a conference room in my office building. I remember later hearing that a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania, and someone in the office trying to call family in the state, and her fear, when her call did not go through. That night emailing an acquaintance who worked at the Pentagon (she was all right) and another whose office I thought was in lower Manhattan (he was all right too, although the offices were not).

I remember for a few days afterwards, the normally sullen, aggressive drivers among whom I have to make may way to work each day seemed a little less, well, sullen and aggressive. A little less likely to honk the horn for a moment's delay when the light turned green, a little more likely to let someone in who needed to change lanes. It only lasted a couple of days, though.

Before September 11, the newspapers had been full of lurid speculation about the congressman from California and a missing intern. I remember standing out in the street a few nights later, talking to my friend Carol, saying that I would be okay with being scared, as long as the public discourse sayed on to things that mattered instead of the kind of stuff that had been in play before.

Tom and I watched Charlie Wilson's War a couple of months ago, the story about how a Congressman from Texas got the U.S. Congress to support the covert war in Afghanistan against the Soviets during the 1980s. He could get Congress to appropriate ever increasing amounts to support the military action, but once the Soviets withdrew, there was no interest in building the schools that might have secured the peace. The movie ends with a great quote from Congressman Wilson, something to the effect that we won the war, and then we screwed everything up.

One of the books I am currently reading is Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Greg Mortenson tried to climb K2, didn't make it to the summit, and on his way back got lost. He ended up in a village that didn't have a school, and decided that he would come back and build one there. I have not gotten to the part of the book where he actually gets the school built, but on the back of the book it says that over the next decade Mortensen built 55 schools " - especially for girls - in the forbidding terrain that gave birth to the Taliban."

Greg Mortenson is still building schools. According to the acknowledgements at the end of the book, it costs "$1 a month for one child's education in Pakistan or Afghanistan, a penny to buy a pencil, and a teacher's salary averages $1 a day." Contributions go to the Central Asia Institute, http://www.ikat.org/, in Bozeman, Montana.

It's been seven years. This year, I think I will remember those events of seven years ago not by flying the flag or by a moment of silence for those who died when the planes crashed, but with my checkbook. If you want to, too, here's the address:

Central Asia Institute
P.O. Box 7209
Bozeman, MT 59771

Primary prevention is almost always best.

New School Zones Released by APS

I couldn't find the new school zones last night, possibly because I was looking in the wrong place; I was checking the rezoning page, but this morning there's a link on the home page:

http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/content/news/hottopics/Morningside-lin.pdf

with questions and answers here:

http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/content/news/hottopics/FAQMorningside-lin.pdf

Because my youngest child is in 5th grade this year, and we live so close to Morningside Elementary, I have not been as anxious as others have been, but the new school zones are astonishing - the entire Virginia-Highlands neighborhood, south of Amsterdam Avenue, is going to the new school. I probably should have seen this coming, but I didn't. Morningside Elementary School, without our neighbors from Virginia Highlands? The new school will initially open with kindergarten through grade 4, so the kids who will be in 5th grade next year will not have to change to the new school.

There will be a Community meeting at Grady High School at 6 p.m. on September 18, and then it goes to the school board for a decision on October 6.

According to the materials APS has posted, if we were using these zones now, Morningside Elementary would be smaller by about 1/3, down to just over 600 students. (I started to say something about head lice but thought better of it.)

Stay tuned. I think things are about to get lively.

Coffee with the Principal

Tom and I went to the coffee with the principal at Morningside Elementary this morning. The big news is that Becky is expecting the new school zones to be posted on the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) website today -- or if not today, no later than Tuesday. Because of growth in enrollment at Morningside and other nearby elementary schools, a new school is being built on Ponce de Leon, where the Morningside kindergarten campus currently is. She said that she expects that APS will convene a Community Meeting about three weeks after the new school zones are released, and then after getting that public input APS will develop a final proposal that will go to the school board for a vote.

She also said that a new assistant principal has been selected, but is awaiting final approval by the school board. The new person is expected to start September 9.

Lots of discussion about air conditioning (an ongoing problem in a few classrooms), strep (should announcements go out if there are strep cases at school?), but the big topic was head lice.

I never had any experience with head lice until I had kids in elementary school. I will never forget that first time I washed the girls heads with RID® and as I rinsed their hair, the dead bugs came streaming out. It was one of those unforgettable moments as a parent, when you realize that your beloved children have been infested with bloodsucking insects for God knows how long and you didn't even know it. And at that point you don't even realize that you don't just do this once. Head lice is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually six stages that parents go through, when they learn that their child has head lice. The first five - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance - are well-known. The sixth one - humor - is highly recommended. Tom thinks that part of the reason they like him so much at the pediatrician's office is that the message he left on the Nurse's Hotline when the girls got head lice that first time included that we were all seriously considering becoming Hare Krishnas and shaving our heads. I have to say that at least based on this meeting this morning very few Morningside Elementary parents have reached this higher, transcental level.

Here's the deal. Head lice are not a health problem. They are a nuisance, but nobody gets rheumatic heart disease as a consequence of head lice infestation. In contrast, that can happen (although it is not common) following strep infections of the throat, so a little perspective is in order here. In a 2002 clinical practice article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Richard Roberts wrote, "In 1998, half the school nurses in the United States would not allow a child with nits back into school. Excluding children from school because of head lice results in anxiety, fear, social stigma, overtreatment, loss of education, and economic loss if parents miss work -- a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. Management should not harm the patient more than the pest."

I did volunteer for the head lice committee (why, I don't know. Maybe I thought I would run out of things to write about otherwise.) So more to follow, I am sure.

ADDENDUM: As of August 30 no information on the new school zones on the APS website that I could find, but according to yesterday's Digital Dolphin it should be available at http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/content/apsrezoning.aspx by no later than September 2. No doubt more to follow on this story as well. It is at least as important as head lice, but maybe not as important as streptococcal infection (at least not the kind that is associated with rheumatic fever).