After swine flu cases, Deer Park schools reopen

When Kathleen Donlon returned to school in Deer Park Monday after it had been shut down because several students were sickened with swine flu, the fourth-grader did as her mother asked: She washed her hands throughout the day.

"About four times," Kathleen, 10, said in an interview in the John F. Kennedy Intermediate School parking lot Monday when her mother, Peggy Donlon, 44, picked her up.

The school is cleaner and notices that once hung on bulletin boards throughout the building were gone, Kathleen said, but other than that everything seemed normal again.

At first, she said, she was a tad apprehensive about going back to class.

"A little bit because I didn't want to catch it," Kathleen said.

JFK and Deer Park's five other public schools, which serve 4,400 students, total, were closed all last week as a precaution after it was learned that three female students contracted the swine flu, also known as H1N1 virus. A fourth student was confirmed to have the virus on Thursday.

All four students have recovered and are back at school, said Elizabeth Marino, superintendent of the Deer Park school district.

Monday, Humayun J. Chaudhry, commissioner of Suffolk County's Department of Health Services, said there have been no additional cases of H1N1 flu reported in Suffolk since Thursday.

With the school closings, Marino said the district took the opportunity to scrub and clean its six buildings and school buses.

Monday at JFK, only 37 students out of 987 were absent, she said. That's a stark contrast to April 30, when 321 students did not come to class at JFK.

Yvonne Mirabito sent her daughter, a third-grader, back to class Monday with a bottle of hand sanitizer and instructed her not to drink from the school's water fountains.

"As a precaution I gave her the hand sanitizer, even though I do feel very confident that they cleaned the school from top to bottom," said Mirabito.

Linda Ponterio, of Deer Park, reminded her daughter, Kristin, a fifth-grader, about personal hygiene. She asked her daughter to cover her mouth when she sneezes and not eat her friends' foods or offer foods to her friends unless they were individually wrapped.

"I just reinforced them a bit more," Ponterio said.

All three women said they supported the district's decision to shut the schools down for a week.