Kids who have lice at school should not be sent home, new guidance says

WASHINGTON (TND) — New guidance from theAmerican Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is telling schools that instead of sending students home when they test positive for head lice, they should just let them go back to class.

It's the first update on head lice protocol from the AAP since 2015. A key point in the new guidance is that head lice infestations are neither a health hazard nor an indication of poor hygiene.

However, the AAP's new guidance does warn that signaling out a child and sending them home due to head lice can result in "phycological stress" and "significant stigma," which the APP now wants schools to avoid.

School exclusion of children or adolescents with nits alone would have resulted in many of these children or adolescents missing school unnecessarily," the new guidance reads. "In addition, head lice infestations have been shown to have low contagion in classrooms."

Because of the lack of evidence of efficacy, routine classroom or schoolwide screening should be discouraged," the new guidance also says.

If a child at school is found to be infected with head lice, the school should contact their parents, the new guidance says, adding that the parent can then contact a pediatrician and determine the best steps from there.

Common sense and calm should prevail within a school when deciding how 'contagious' an individual may be," the AAP says.

Adding to this, children who are infected with lice should be allowed to return to school, the AAP says, even if they are not lice-free yet. The AAP even suggests that zero-tolerance policies on lice infections "may violate a child’s or adolescent’s civil liberties." The AAP says it discourages such policies and asks schools to address their legal counsels about them.

No healthy child or adolescent should be excluded from school or allowed to miss school time because of head lice or nits," the AAP says in the new guidance. "Medical providers should educate school communities that no-nit policies for return to school should be abandoned, because such policies would have negative consequences for children’s or adolescents’ academic progress, may violate their civil rights, and stigmatize head lice as a public health hazard."

While the AAP has several recommended treatments for head lice, including topical ointments and battery-powered "louse combs," it very much does not want parents to shave their child's head.

Although effective for removing head lice and nits, shaving the head generally is not required nor recommended, because it can be traumatizing to a child or adolescent and distressing to the caregiver," the AAP says.