Martin County school district and health officials are working to determine what caused more than 100 students, some of them ill, to stay home from Hobe Sound Elementary School on Wednesday and Thursday.

On Thursday, 124 of the school’s 715 students were absent, Martin school district spokeswoman Cathy Brennan said.

The day before, 118 were absent, while another 24 children went home early, complaining of nausea and vomiting, Brennan said.

School officials don’t know how many students have become ill and how many are staying home simply as a precaution after the school sent out an automated phone message to parents notifying them about Wednesday’s unusually high number of absences.

In the message, the school urged parents to take their children to their family doctor or the health department if they complained of illness, Brennan said.

Staffers from the health department checked the school on Gomez Avenue on Wednesday, but didn’t notice anything unusual, said Mark Chittum, the department’s administrator. Officials checked the cafeteria and asked about procedures maintenance staff follow for cleaning.

On Thursday the department picked up two samples of vomit and mailed them to a lab to check for any viruses or anything else that might have prompted the students’ illness, Chittum said. Results are expected by the end of today or Monday, he said.
Chittum said his department is interviewing parents to help figure out what might have been the source of the illness, and that officials haven’t ruled out that something other than the school might have caused it.

Brennan said that health department officials checked on the school on Wednesday, but found nothing unusual. Still, the school took the precaution of doing some extra cleaning on Wednesday night.

“Right now we don’t know what caused the kids to get ill,” Brennan said.

Roughly 30 students are absent from an elementary school during a typical day, Brennan said.
By ANA X. CERON
~ana_ceron@pbpost.com

Tags: elementary, health department, Hobe Sound, ill, illness, kids, nausea, sick, students

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Hobe Sound, Schools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.