Welcome to my webpage!
Please remember to call 364-0197, to report your child's absence. Please leave a brief message regarding child's symptoms, so that I may monitor for spread of illness in school. All information is kept confidential. Please be sure to do a daily assessment of your child and keep them home if they have any signs of illness.
Tick alert
This promises to be a severe tick year. I have already been pulling numerous ticks off of students. To better help you, I have put together some tick management information, including some natural tips for those parents concerned with the use of pesticides like DEET which has been determined as safe, but the more tools in our arsenal the better, right?
- Dress Defensively. When you venture into areas where ticks might be waiting, dress for the occasion. Wear a hat and light-colored clothing (to help you see ticks before they find skin), and tuck your shirt into your pants and your pants into your socks. You may look goofy, but it’s better than becoming a tick’s dinner.
- Get Sticky. Keep a sticky tape-type lint roller handy if you’re finding ticks regularly. This little gizmo will pick up unattached ticks from clothing or pets, which bring hitchhiking ticks into the house. Use any type of sticky tape to cleanly capture ticks crawling in your home.
- Clean Up Your Act. When you come indoors after outside activities, give your clothes a 10-minute spin in a hot clothes dryer to kill any ticks that might be hiding in the folds or seams or bag them tightly until you are able to wash and dry them. Then take a hot, soapy bath or shower. Unattached ticks will be flushed away, but you will still need to do a tick check of your body.
- Do Tick Checks. Ticks must feed for 24 to 48 hours in order to transmit Lyme disease, so regularly checking yourself for ticks after you’ve been in wooded areas is a hugely effective preventive measure. Look for tiny and foreign dark dots, especially in moist body creases in the armpits, groin, hairline, scalp, waistband and the backs of your knees. Let someone else check you, if possible, because it’s difficult to check your own scalp and backside. Because of their tiny size, it is entirely possible to carry a nymph on your body long enough for it to feed and then drop off without you ever knowing you were bitten, so be sure to check often and carefully. Check yourself before bed, too.
- Upgrade Your Tick Removal Equipment. Use tweezers or a pair of forceps to remove an attached tick from yourself or your pets, or try using small tick removal “spoons” such as the Tick Twister for little deer ticks, Ticked Off for any size ticks, or a Tick Key tick remover for larger dog ticks. All of these devices cost less than $5 and they are worth every penny. Look for them at pet stores or from online merchants.
- Put Poultry to Work. Ticks have few natural predators but flocks of poultry have made big impacts on tick populations, if that is feasible for where you live. In a study from South Africa, chickens were found to eat an average of 10 ticks per hour
- Welcome Wildlife. Your homestead is less likely to become a Lyme disease hot spot if it includes numerous species of mammals, birds, and reptiles for ticks to feed on instead of white-footed mice. Newly hatched tick larvae are disease-free, and if they feed on animals that are poor reservoirs of Lyme disease — most squirrels, for example — fewer nymphs will be infected.
8. Maintain Mowed Buffer Zones. Ticks sometimes do wander onto the edges of lawns, but they are most likely to find you as you walk through tall grass, work around low shrubbery, or hang out in shady, mulched areas. Open lawn makes poor tick habitat, so a swath of lawn makes a good buffer zone between your house and the wilder habitats preferred by ticks. Ticks also dislike crossing wood chipped areas so lining play areas outside or edging lawns can help decrease tick numbers.
- Perfume Your Pants. If you must venture into tick territory often, pump up the deterrent properties of your pants. Commercially made plant-based pesticides that deter ticks are made with lemon eucalyptus oil (available in Repel products as well as Cutter Lemon Eucalyptus Spray). It’s fragrant stuff, so you may prefer heavily treating your pants and socks better than slathering it on your skin. If tick levels are high and you need to be in their habitat a lot, you may want to try the pesticide permethrin on your clothes and/or use of an insect repellent containing 20-30% DEET.
- Natural and may be helpful to use. Natural non harmful substances ticks are known to dislike include essential oils like rose geranium, rosemary, lavender, lemongrass, citronella and eucalyptus to use on clothes or skin…growing some of these herbs around your yard may also help. Avon product skin so soft on the skin has been known to repel ticks as well.
- Treat your pets. Dogs, cats and other pets that are allowed outdoors can bring ticks in. Call your veterinarian and do your research on tick prevention methods such as topical, or oral medication and flea/tick collars and use religiously with your pets. Pets may also contract illness and expose your family by bringing the ticks inside to you. Brushing pets each night while outside and before allowing pets in can also reduce risk of ticks inside.
IF you remove a tick quickly (within 24 hours) you greatly reduce your chances of getting Lyme disease.
How to remove a tick: 1. If a tick is attached to you, use fine-tipped tweezers or other tick removal device to grasp the tick at the surface of your skin. 2. Pull the tick straight up and out. Don’t twist or jerk the tick—this can cause the mouth parts to break off and stay in the skin. If this happens, remove the mouth parts with tweezers if you can. If not, leave them alone and let your skin heal. 3. Clean the bite and your hands with rubbing alcohol, an iodine scrub, or soap and water. 4. You may get a small bump or redness that goes away in 1-2 days, like a mosquito bite. This is not a sign that you have Lyme disease.
When to see your doctor: See a doctor if you develop a fever, a rash, severe fatigue, facial paralysis, or joint pain or swelling without associated injury within 30 days of being bitten by a tick. For this reason it is important to note the date of the tick bite on your calendar. Be sure to tell your doctor about your tick bite. If you have these symptoms and work where Lyme disease is common, it is important to get treatment right away. If you do not get treatment, serious complications can arise including severe arthritis and problems with your nerves, spinal cord, brain, or heart. Antibiotics are used to treat Lyme disease, your doctor will prescribe specific antibiotics, typically for 2-3 weeks. Most patients recover during this time. You may feel tired while you are recovering, even though the infection is cured. If you wait longer to seek treatment or take the wrong medicine, you may have symptoms that are more difficult to treat.
Looking ahead to recovery: Take your antibiotics as recommended. Allow yourself plenty of rest. It may take time to feel better, just as it takes time to recover from other illnesses. Some people wonder if there is a test to confirm that they are cured. This is not possible. Your body remembers an infection long after it has been cured. Additional blood tests might be positive for months or years. Don’t let this alarm you. It doesn’t mean you are still infected. Finally, practice prevention against tick bites. You can get Lyme disease again if you are bitten by another infected tick.
Stay safe and be well. Mrs. Sheehan, Sharon Center School Nurse
Physicals
Physicals are required for all new entrants to school, all Pre-K and K students, all students in grade 6 and any students in grades 7 and 8 who plan to play school sports. This physical should be valid for the entire season of the sport played.
What's going around?
05/21/25: one with mild cold symptoms versus allergies in primary
Middle School Sports
- Our school is participating in Middle School Sports this year. Any student in grades 7/8 that plans to play must hav e a physical on file in the health office that will not expire during the season of the sport they plan to play.
- All other athletic forms will be sent in an online format and returned to Anne McNeil, Region 1 Athletic Director. Forms must be completed before start of play.
Snack Time
We incorporate a snack time into each day as many children are hungry between meal times. Please help your child pack a healthy snack each day. There are usually a limited number of snacks in my office for those days when your child forgets.
Respiratory Safety Measures
To keep our school community safe and able to learn:
- Daily check expectation for all students (done by parents) and self assessment for all staff to determine if symptoms of illness. If ill, to stay home and follow guidelines for return.
- Report to the school nurse if you will be absent.
- If symptoms of illness, check for elevated temperature, must remain out until fever free for 24 hours without the use of fever reducing medication. (Fever considered a temperature greater than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. )
- If other symptoms, like cough, runny nose, etc...please do a rapid covid test daily while symptomatic and before attending school, if negative and fever free without medications, you may attend school if feeling able to do so.
- Frequent hand washing/ use of hand sanitizer
- Practice good respiratory hygiene, covering coughs, sneezes, use of tissue
- If Covid positive: remain home until you are fever free for 24 hours without the use of medications, your other symptoms are improving, and you are able to participate fully in your day. It is recommended to mask upon return, and follow good respiratory etiquette to help decrease chances of spread to others.
- Please contact me if you have any questions or concerns about your child's health
Attendance questions answered
These are some parts of our attendance , I am frequently asked to clarify:
Chronically Truant and Chronically Absent are not the same.
Chronically truant is triggered when the student has unexcused absences over the parent count of nine. Which is why doctor's notes are encouraged any time your child goes to the doctor as those are not in the parent count. Once a child is identified as chronically truant, parents/guardians receive notification and further intervention may be indicated.
Chronically Absent is triggered by # of absences, excused or unexcused for any student greater than 10% of the current days of enrollment. For example if we have been in school for 114 days and your child has been absent (excused or unexcused) for 11 days- that would be 10% and is reported automatically to the State. They collect the data monthly. Fro the entire year, 18 days out of the 180 total days in session, would be 10%. The results of chronically absent students is available by statistics, not personal identification to anyone looking up information on our school.
1. Parents can call their children out as absent for any reason up to nine times without written documentation by a doctor or other provider, but it does need to be reported to the school nurse to be excused.
2. After absence nine, documentation is required, so if a child is sick, that would be a doctor's note, or the absence may be excused for the other reasons listed in our policy and the appropriate documentation.
3. To help keep absences down for the parent under the nine count, it is a good idea to get a doctor's note whenever your child goes to the doctor for an illness, as those would not be in the parent count of nine. It is also a good idea to schedule appointments either early in the morning or in the later afternoon, so your child does not need to miss the entire day and could come late or leave early to accommodate those appointments.
4. We encourage vacations and time away to be scheduled when school is not in session and much time is already built into the school calendar during the year to take those breaks but if you do have plans during the school year, getting the Extraordinary Educational Opportunities ( Planned Leave form), filled out and signed off on by the Principal BEFORE going away, would excuse those absences wihout being in the Parent count of nine. Keep in mind though that those absences do accrue into the potential 10% of the school year missed for chronically absent.
5. There are 2 Mental Health days that can be used per year, these do not count in the parent count of 9 but must be reported to the school nurse as those type of absences. They do count in the student total absence accrual.
6. The School Nurse can excuse an absence for illness, if they have dismissed your child ill, or determined they were ill. However, we can only excuse them for a couple of days, if illness is taking longer to resolve, they need to be evaluated by their doctor.
7. To report your child absent, please contact the nurse directly, you may leave a message on my confidential line, 860-364-0197 or email me at dsheehan@sharoncenterschool.org.
Please call me or stop in anytime, if you have questions or any health concerns you need clarified. My door is always open.
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