• When to Keep Your Child Home from School

    Upon occasion, it is necessary for your child to remain home due to an illness. The following guidelines should be followed to determine whether to keep your child home:

    • Your child should not be sent to school hoping that he or she will feel better after arriving. 
    • Your child should be kept home following a nighttime bout of nausea, vomiting or diarrhea, and watched for further symptoms.
    • Your child should remain home if he or she has had a temperature of 100 degrees or higher. A child should have a normal temperature for 24 hours before returning to school. 
    • Do not send your child if he or she is taking prescription pain medicine.  
    • Read more information at our COVID-19 FAQs.

    Communicable Diseases

    Parents often ask about sending their children to schools with a communicable disease. The Pennsylvania Department of Health offers the following guidelines and exclusion periods:
    • Pink Eye: 24 hours after initiation of treatment
    • Strep Throat: Scarlet fever: 24 hours after initiation of treatment 
    • Lice: Until treated with a pediculicidal agent. Students who have been excluded must be checked by the school nurse and found free of lice eggs before re-entering the school 
    • Chicken Pox: Six days from the outbreak of the last crop of blisters with all pox marks dried
    • Impetigo, scabies or ringworm: Until judged non-infectious by the physician. 

    The Pine Richland School District follows the Allegheny County Health Department Guide to Infectious Diseases For Schools to determine when a child should return to school after an infectious illness. Specific information on strep throat, pink eye, lice, chickenpox and other common infectious illnesses in schools are outlined in the link above.