With flu season in swing and an H1N1 influenza scare sweeping the nation, Tombstone Unified School District shut down Huachuca City School for the week of Oct. 6 as a high number of students were out sick with flu-like symptoms.

“We had a large number of students, approximately 36 percent of the entire student body absent with flu like symptoms and about 10 staff members that were out,” said Tombstone Unified School District Superintendent Karl Uterhardt.

On Friday, Oct. 2, 140 of Huachuca City School’s 475 students missed school due to the flu. Matters worsened over the weekend when the number grew to 171 students who were out sick come Monday, Oct. 5.

While on the Huachuca City School campus, located 25 miles west of Tombstone, Uterhardt said he witnessed a number of students visiting the nurse’s office with high fevers and other flu-like symptoms.

Huachuca City School had three confirmed cases of H1N1—commonly know as swine flu—prior to the school closing, he said.

After discussing the situation with Vaira Harik, director of the Cochise County Health Department, Uterhardt made the decision to shut down the school for the rest of the week. The school will reopen on Monday, Oct. 19th after a district wide one-week fall break.

Harik said she supported the school closure, according to a press release issued by Uterhardt.

“Parents need to sit down and have a backup plan for their child care and must not send their children to school sick,” Harik said. “Lots of sick kids going to school get everybody sick.”

Both of the district’s other schools, Tombstone High School and Walter J. Meyer Elementary School, are open for business as usual, as the number of ill students has not reached the “epidemic proportions” of Huachuca City School, Uterhardt said.

On Monday, Oct. 5 Tombstone High School had 21 percent of students out with flu like symptoms. Its highest rate yet, said Tombstone High School Principal Robert Devere. By Tuesday that number had fallen to 19 percent.

“I haven’t seen this kind of rate before,” Devere said.

Walter J. Meyer Elementary School also saw a drop in the number of students absent due to illness. The numbers fell from 28 percent on Friday to 21 percent on Monday, Uterhardt said.

With the number of ill students dropping at both Walter J. Meyer and Tombstone High, Uterhardt has not been forced to take the same measure he took with Huachuca City School.

Keeping an eye on the situation, Uterhardt said the district is going on a day-to-day basis and tracking the number of students absent in the morning and those leaving during the day.

Uterhardt plans to utilize the days of closure at Huachuca City School and the weeklong break to clean up and disinfect all three schools in the district.
As for making up missed school days at Huachuca City School, Uterhardt said, “That really isn’t a concern of ours at the time. What we are really concerned about is the spread of this through our student population and our families.”

“We have a lot of families out there where their kids go to school healthy and come home sick and it’s not a good scenario,” he said, “we wanted to prevent what we could.”

For more information regarding both seasonal influenza and the H1N1 flu, visit www.flu.gov.