Flu closing of schools do not keep kids at home

Many experts on how to contain the spread of flu have questioned the efficacy of school closures. The following article in the New York Times from May 21, 2009 reminds us that students whose schools were closed will not always stay

at home.

Flu Closings Failing to Keep Schoolchildren at Home
By JULIE BOSMAN

Karla Rodriguez swept the sidewalk Wednesday morning outside the Glamour Hair Salon in Corona, Queens. Then Karla, a third grader at Public School 19 in Corona, took a seat in the back of the store, where her mother was shampooing a customer’s hair, and began playing Super Mario Brothers. “She’s bored here,” said her mother, Rosario Hernandez.

Jonathan Guerrero, who is 13, circled around a park on his scooter for hours, stopping only for ice cream. Marlene Telalyan, 14, spent an afternoon swanning around the Queens Center Mall with a pack of her girlfriends.

“My mom told me not to go out,” she proclaimed, giggling. “Too bad she’s at work and can’t see me.”

With swine flu still shuttering schools and more than 15,000 students granted an unexpected week off, they are scattering across Queens this week like new visitors to a planet called Weekday, somewhere between a snow day and a full summer vacation. Students have popped up among adults in stores, parks and libraries, places they are often forbidden to visit unsupervised.

At libraries in Queens, staff members normally accustomed to questioning truants have relaxed their rules to accommodate a sudden influx of children.

“It’s a weird week,” said Joanne King, a library spokeswoman. “As long as they’re not causing any trouble, we’ll let them stay there.”

But their newfound freedom was accompanied by some fear, as both students and parents worried about the flu’s continuing to spread.

“Right now, it’s like a panic,” said Rachel Park, the director of the Immanuel Genius Educational Center, a day care center in Flushing. She normally does not take children older than 5 and could not accommodate any walk-ins. “Most of the parents have to work, and they can’t take their kids with them,” Ms. Park said. “So they are keeping the kids at home alone.”

Thirty public and private schools have closed in the last week, including three more Queens public schools and a South Bronx charter high school on Wednesday, because of unusually high level of “influenza-like illness.”

City officials said that the densely packed schools had turned into incubators of disease, and expressed hope that their closings would stop the spread of germs. Most schools remained open, however, including many with higher than normal absentee rates, raising the prospect of thousands more children circulating in public during the day.

Responding to calls for more transparency in its decision making, the city Department of Education on Wednesday began releasing daily attendance rates for New York City public schools on its Web site.

Some people seemed to be avoiding public places entirely. At a park in Corona across the street from Public School 16, which is closed, one of the few people there was a parks department employee wearing a surgical mask.

Sitting on the stoop of the Corona home she shares with her sister and nephew, Rosa Rojas pointed to a playground across the street.

“This park,” she said, “would normally be full at this time, when it’s so nice out and there’s no classes.”

But liberated from school, and away from the watchful eyes of parents and teachers, many students simply recongregated elsewhere.

Bianca Arevalo, 13, an eighth grader at Intermediate School 5 in Flushing, met her 14-year-old cousin, Melissa Prado, at a mall on Tuesday, where they wandered through stores, linking arms and listening to the same iPod.

Bianca had spent the last week sick with fever, cough and a sore throat, communicating with friends only through instant messaging. (She went to the hospital but tested negative for swine flu on Monday, she said.)

“I’m still kind of sick,” she said, coughing into her hand. “But I wanted to come and hang out.”

“I’m not really afraid of getting sick, because she’s my cousin,” Melissa said. “If she gets the flu, I get the flu.”

Raquel Valerio, a stay-at-home mother of four, took her two daughters, Sheryl and Brianna, shopping on Tuesday after their school, P.S. 19, was shut down.

“But I have another son who’s going to school across the street, and his school is open,” Ms. Valerio said, wearily. “I wish they would just shut them all down.”

The vision of thousands of students spending the week out of school but still in close proximity was not exactly what city officials had in mind. Marge Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said they had hoped that students whose schools were closed would stay at home.

“We really are encouraging them to keep up with their schoolwork,” Ms. Feinberg said. “We hope that they follow the curriculum that we’re providing.”

That curriculum, posted on the department’s Web site, is divided by grade level and provides 80 pages of material for each student to read.

First graders, the curriculum suggests, could watch “educational” television programs like “Clifford the Big Red Dog” on PBS. Eighth graders were prodded to write “a letter to President Obama about a topic that interests you,” or “ short story, poem, or lyrics to a song.”

“Even though your school is closed, you can use this time to continue learning,” the document said.

Some parents said they were trying to encourage just that.

As the temperature soared into the 80s on Wednesday, Blanca Campoverde, 36, rushed her daughter Nagelly, 7, and son Sebastian, 9, home after running errands, heeding the advice of their school principal, who warned parents not to take children to meeting places like local libraries or parks.

Instead, they would do homework and read, Ms. Campoverde said. “I prefer to have them at home,” she said.

At the Queens Center Mall on Tuesday, Dawn Amenn, 41, confessed to resorting to “weekend stuff” like video games and television to occupy her children, Faith and Scott, until their school, St. Joseph in Queens, re-opened after Memorial Day. Ms. Amenn said she had to take off work from her job at a Catholic organization. (“My boss is very understanding,” she said.)

“I’m so happy to be off,” said her daughter, Faith, a beaming 14-year-old. She added, diplomatically: “It would have been great if it was for another reason.”