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With regard to the question raised by the School Board,
that children cannot be legally excluded from obtaining proper
educational advantages when not residents in infectious houses,"
it is of course beyond my province to express any opinion, but I
may remind you that the steps taken in this case have been no
new departure on the part of the Sanitary Authority, as it has
always been their custom, when ordering the closure of a parti
cular class, to also require the exclusion of the other residents in
the homes of the children of the closed class, and the extracts
from my annual reports which will be found in the appendix to
this report, furnish several instances of this proceeding.
I may point out that if the partial closure, hitherto requested
by the Sanitary Authority, cannot be enforced, the alternative will
be, in cases similar to these, to close either the entire department
or the whole school, with the result that there would be, in either
case, an interference with the education of a much larger number
of children. In the present case, by the method adopted there
were excluded from school:—
Infants' Department, including those in class "H" 210
Girls' „ 69
Boys' „ 67
336
while in the whole school there were :—
Infants' Department 702
Boys' „ 514
Girls' „ 583
1,799
so that interference with education was minimised in a marked
degree.
The experience I have had of these class outbreaks, leads me to
believe that they are usually due to the attendance at school of a
child or children suffering from unrecognised Diphtheria, and the
best course, in my opinion, to check any further spread of the
disease, is to promptly close the infected class, and as it is always
probable that pome other members of the class have been already