View report page

44
The regulations of the Education Department (Art. 88)
prescribe, as one of the general conditions required to be fulfilled
by a Public Elementary School in order to obtain the grant,
that the managers must at once comply with any notice of the
Sanitary Authority, acting on the advice of the Medical Officer
of Health, requiring them for a specified time, with a view to
preventing the spread of disease, or any danger to health likely
to arise from the condition of the school, either to close the
school, or to exclude any scholars from attendance, but provides
for their appeal to the Department, after complying, if they
consider the notice unreasonable.
It has not been found necessary during the year to make
use of this provision for the closing of any school, it having been
found so far sufficient to exclude scholars from infected houses
from attendance for that purpose, daily returns being forwarded
to the Head Masters of Schools notifying the existence of
infectious disease at the residences of scholars attending such
schools.
Table XIII. illustrates the epidemic or zymotic mortality for
the past eleven years with the resulting death rates. The
number of deaths from each class of disease is shewn. The
zymotic death rate for 1897 was 2.3 per thousand persons, being
low.er than in any other year in the ten years preceding.