Nurses in Oklahoma City district will give H1N1 shots
Schools ask parents to keep children with a fever at home

Oklahoma City School District nurses will offer swine flu vaccinations to students this year in an effort to prevent outbreaks.

"When the H1N1 vaccine comes out, we’ll get it to our children as soon as possible. We’ve got 30 nurses to do that,” Johnson said. "We’re not worried. We’re going to handle it.”

The district is expected to receive enough vaccine for its about 36,000 students starting in October. Johnson said she hopes the vaccine will arrive in waves so nurses will give shots over time. Nurses will go to schools that have more permission slips first, she said.

Classes start Thursday.

Johnson said prevention, through the vaccination and efforts such as hand washing, will be the key to keeping swine flu out of the schools.

Officials also will ask parents to keep children with fevers of 100 degrees or higher home until they’ve been fever-free without medication for 24 hours, Johnson said.

The elementary schools have hand sanitizer in the classrooms, and high school and middle school classrooms will later. The district will distribute educational material to parents in English and Spanish and put it on the Web site, Johnson said.

The district also will provide reusable masks to employees such as nurses and secretaries who might be monitoring sick children before parents pick them up.

Superintendent Karl Springer said administrators started working on a plan last spring. After updated Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines came out last week, administrators reviewed them and updated the plan where necessary.

"We’re going to be very careful to protect our children,” Springer said.

Springer didn’t want to reveal the percentage of absences that could cause a school to be closed. Doing so could encourage students not to attend in an attempt to get classes canceled, he said.

Most schools have just started in Oklahoma somewhere between August 13th and August 22nd. This is starting to move pretty quickly. These areas are nowhere near each other. OU is in the middle of the state in Norman, Tulsa is up north, some of the grade schools are around Tulsa like Broken Arrow, and OSU is Stillwater, in totally different direction, I have no clue where Owasso is.