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9
Attendance Officers. The Attendance Officers individually 1 have
always found most willing and even zealous to assist and work
in harmony with the School Medical Officer's department, but
their work has not yet been correlated with that of school hygiene.
The Attendance Officers' concern should rest exclusively with
those whose absence from school is in no way related to officially
recognised illness or its prevention.
The prompt discovery of the cause of absence from school,
and where that cause is illness its notification to the School
Medical Officer should be the immediate and first duty of the
Attendance Officer; the regulation of school attendance during
illness, both of the patient and of other inmates of the house,
should be the responsibility of the School Medical Officer, and his
staff trained to enquire into cases of sickness should be adequate
for this purpose. A system of notification to the attendance
officers of cases whose further exclusion from school on ground of
health has become unnecessary should be set up. In a word,
absenteeism should be classified into that which is due to illness
and so is no concern of the Attendance Officer, and absenteeism
due to other causes which it is his duly to prevent.
PARENTS AND MEDICAL INSPECTION.
Parents have appreciated the value and importance of medical
inspection to an unexpected extent. There have, of course, been
objectors who have refused to submit their children to examination,
and others who, without raising specific objection, have
obstructed by keeping their children from school on the day
appointed for their medical inspection.
The number of definite refusals received amounts to 193, or
1.8 per cent, of the total number of children examined, and by
far the greater pumber of parents have shown themselves appreciative
of the advantages to their children which medical inspection
provides. In the case of girls and infants the mothers usually