Exclusion from School for Health Reasons
Our goal in health services is to support student success by returning students who are safe, healthy, and ready to learn to the classroom as quickly as possible. In order to accomplish that, nursing assessments provide the best foundation in health/hygiene situations to determine when to send a child home so that appropriate parental intervention may be quickly begun and safe readmittance achieved.
A major health consideration for exclusion from school is the potential for spread of disease from person to person; the nurse's office will send students home in accordance with state laws regarding communicable diseases, based on signs and symptoms related to those diseases. A student may also have symptoms, behaviors, or conditions that are not necessarily automatically excludable, but still keep the student from effectively participating in the educational process. The nurse's office may also exclude a student when those symptoms, behaviors, or conditions are health or hygiene related.
Students who exhibit the following signs and symptoms will be excluded from school until:
- the symptoms are gone for 24 hours or
- a physician provides written information that the condition is not contagious or that the student is under treatment and may return to school.
- fever (oral equivalent) of 100º or more
- persistent vomiting (two or more episodes, one episode of vomiting is often not illness-related)
- diarrhea – two or more watery or loose stools, whether or not associated with fever
- skin rashes if rapidly spreading, purulent, weeping, or associated with fever
- purulent or crusting discharge from eyes with reddened conjunctiva
- persistent cough with bloody sputum
The signs and symptoms below require assessment, and may result in exclusion:
- inflamed or watery eyes
- sore throats, especially with exudate present
- persistent dry cough, especially if other abnormal sounds are present
- green/yellow nasal discharge
- skin rashes not already defined above
- incontinence of feces or urine, especially when requiring a complete change of clothing and/or extensive presence of excretions in body cavities, hair, shoes, etc.
For all information on conditions that may require a student's exclusion from school in Texas, view the following links: