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44
SCHOOL CLOSURE.
In February I received a Memorandum from the Local Government
Board on the circumstances under which the closing of schools, or exclusion
therefrom of particular children, may be required.
Reference is several times made to the Code for 1907, but important
alterations were made in that for 1908. By this latter the Schools' Medical.
Officer is authorised to exclude individual children "on the ground that their
exclusion is desirable to prevent the spread of disease," but the power toclose
a school or department is still wisely left to the Local Sanitary
Authority, acting on the advice of the Medical Officer of Health; there isnow
no appeal from the Managers to the Board of Education. The diseases
for which action on the part of the Sanitary Authority may be called for are
specified to be scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles, German measles, whooping
cough, small - pox, and epidemic influenza; more rarely, for diarrhoeal diseases
and enteric fever. Individual scholars with contagious diseases, such as
vermin, are evidently left to the School Medical Officer. The Board point out
that the Sanitary Authority, when considering the closure of a school, should
do so with a view to preventing the spread of disease, and not in the financial
interests of the school.
Measles and Whooping" Cough. I fear many teachers,
especially at Sunday Schools, fail to realise the seriousness of measles and
whooping cough, because, although the death-rates of these two diseases are
always much heavier than from the dreaded scarlet fever and diphtheria, this
fact is not brought to the notice of the teachers, who, although they may
know that measles or whooping cough, or both together, are prevalent, see
few of their scholars' places subsequently rendered vacant by death therefrom.
Of the long list of deaths amongst the children under school age the
teachers can have no direct knowledge, and in this year under review all the
death save one (viz., 33) from measles and whooping cough were of children
under five years of age. See Section " Measles," on a previous page.
THE MEDICAL INSPECTION OF CHILDREN IN
THE PUBLIC ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS.
The Education (Administrative Provisions) Act, 1907, came into forceon
January 1st, 1908, but only Section 13b is of interest to us here.
The first part is compulsory and the latter part optional.
Section 13b is as follows:—"The duty of the Local Education Authority
is to provide for the medical inspection of children immediately
before, or at the time of, or as soon as possible after, their admission to a.