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Schools contemplate bird flu crisis

"We don't have a choice but to get prepared," the school district's emergency management czar says.

By DONNA WINCHESTER
Published July 23, 2006

In the brilliance of a summer morning, it was hard to imagine the devastation a deadly flu virus from across the ocean could wreak on the Tampa Bay area.

Pinellas County school officials recently asked School Board members to try.

If the H5N1 virus, also known as bird flu, were to migrate to this area, the board was told at its most recent workshop, 40 percent of the population could be affected. That would include teachers, parents and children.

Schools could be used as hospitals for an overflow of sick people. They could become orphanages for children whose parents die from the flu. They even could be used as morgues to store bodies.

"We don't have a choice but to get prepared," said Carol Madura, project director of emergency management and crisis response for the school district. "If the flu comes and we're not prepared, shame on us."

State and federal agencies have mandated that local school districts take precautionary measures, Madura said. The Hillsborough County school district participated in a countywide emergency drill at the Florida State Fairgrounds in April.

Pinellas school officials have been working with the Pinellas County Health Department since last spring to monitor student attendance.

If attendance were to drop from an average of 2 percent to more than 10 percent, a school could be closed. If attendance districtwide dropped to 20 percent, or about 22,000 students, all schools could be closed.

"We would have the authority to declare a quarantine or to ask people to stay at home," said Jeanine Mallory, spokeswoman for the Pinellas County Health Department.

"We could close theaters, schools, malls. It would depend on the severity and what we knew about that particular strain of flu."

Madura hopes it won't come to that. To prevent or mitigate an outbreak of avian influenza, the district will begin encouraging teachers to educate staffers, students and parents on the possible dangers of contact with wild birds.

If a school's attendance begins to drop substantially because of fever, respiratory symptoms, sore throats or headaches, teachers will begin showing children how to cough or sneeze into their elbows instead of their hands if no facial tissue is available.

School staffers also will encourage children to wash their hands frequently and to clean their desks with disinfectant.

If attendance continues to drop, handshakes will be eliminated as a greeting. Children and school staffers will be required to wash their hands three times a day, and the district could stop serving meals in the cafeteria.

But the district's emergency management team has additional concerns.

Among them: How would children receive instruction if schools were closed for six weeks or more? Would the district enforce mandatory summer school to make up for lost time?

Could teachers who have used all their sick time get additional days off with pay if they were ill with bird flu?

In the event that classes have to be moved, the district recently applied for a $500,000 grant that would outfit each school with a box of supplies including a first aid kit, latex gloves and disinfectant, Madura said. Each box would contain a class roster and a list of students' home phone numbers.

The "Go Box" would allow a school to carry on the business of education in the event of a flu outbreak or any other disaster, including a hurricane or a tornado, Madura said.

North Shore Elementary principal Nita Deason said taking precautions to prevent the spread of illness is nothing new.

"We routinely teach hygiene to children because of the prevalence of communicable diseases, whether they're respiratory or intestinal," Deason said.

"The teachers keep hand sanitizer in their classrooms so the children always have that available."

Madura said the district has become more active about bird flu since the World Health Organization reported in late June that an Indonesian man who died from the H5N1 strain "almost certainly" caught the disease from his 10-year-old son.

Health officials had predicted that the chances of a pandemic would increase once bird flu could be transmitted from person to person rather than from birds to people.

Still, not all scientists agree that bird flu is a threat.

Some doubt its existence, and others have suggested it is a hoax concocted to scare people or divert their attention from other issues.

Madura says the school district isn't taking any chances.

"It's not a question of whether or not you're going to think about this," she said.

"The issue facing us now is: 'How bad is it going to be?' "

[Last modified July 22, 2006, 20:14:03]