When To Stay Home

When To Stay Home

Sometimes it is difficult to know when to keep your child at home or to send them to school. A child might be sniffling or even have a slight fever creating a conundrum for the parent, especially in this COVID environment. To help, the Washington Department of Health and the Snohomish Health District (SHD) have recently published flowcharts to help employees and parents to answer these questions. Since health departments take precedence over the state, the following information comes from the SHD.

If students have any of the Class A symptoms they should not come to school. These are tell-tale symptoms of a sickness that will take a while to recover from and that may indicate a COVID infection. Class A symptoms are having a fever of 100.4 F or higher, chills, muscle or body aches, cough, loss of taste and/or smell, or shortness of breath. After, students may return to school if it has been at least 24 hours since any fever has resolved without medication, AND symptoms have improved, AND 10 days have passed since symptoms started. Another way to affirm that they may come to school with no concerns about having COVID is to have a negative COVID test.

Class B symptoms are not as serious, but if a student has more than one of them, the sickness should be treated the way someone who has Class A symptoms is treated. Class B symptoms are fatigue, headache, sore throat, congestion or runny nose, nausea or vomiting, or diarrhea. However, if a student has only one of these symptoms for less than 24 hours he or she may return to school. It is not unusual for a child to have some of these symptoms for a short while, but for them to clear up shortly.

I hope this information is helpful to families and keeps our school healthy. This is a link to the SHD document from which this information has been taken.