Good afternoon, what are your policies on returning to school after being sent home with a full body rash? Does the return to school note from Dr. need to state if it was a childhood disease since other children and staff were exposed to it? That makes sense to me in case other children also have the same rash then we know that we need to report it to licesning. Any thoughts appreciated.
Marsha MacIntyre
We do rashes on a case by case basis. If we have no idea what is causing it, we ask the parents to contact their doctor. We don't require notes, we take the parents at their word. A lot of times they are able to just submit photos to the doctor and get a response. I tend to wait for more than one case of anything before informing parents. I try not to alarm everyone until we know it's going around.
Licensing and the health department require us to report and we can't do that without the information. I have it in my handbook that we need to know. We never tell the parents who the person is of course.
I had this happen a couple of weeks ago. I sent the child home and asked the parents to take him to the doctor to see if it was one of the childhood diseases. It was not. I had them get a doctor's note to return to school. If it had been something like 5th Disease, etc., I would have sent out an email to all the parents with the signs and symptoms.