Your school may want to conduct a school-wide head check for all children. This is a sensitive issue, so if conducted, notify parents in advance and try not to stigmatize or embarrass individual kids who have lice. Follow up with these families to help alleviate the problem.

A chronic case of head lice occurs when the child is infested during three separate months during a school year or for six consecutive weeks. It is important to identify these children. These cases should be reported to the school attendance review board and be addressed by a multi-disciplinary work group to determine the best approach to resolving the problem.

Sometimes this can mean a child will miss school for a long time. While this is hard on the parents and the children, it is usually best, overall, for the community, because any remaining nits can hatch and then infest other children. If kids come back before the nits are completely gone, the infestation will never completely go away. To completely stop an infestation of the community, each infested child should be kept at home until all the lice and nits are gone. This also requires that parents try to deal with the problem quickly.

The best way to solve the problem of children missing school because of lice is to make sure that all children who get lice are treated quickly and completely so they can go back to school promptly without infecting other children.