Health and Safety

We plan to increase your child’s awareness of good personal hygiene habits by emphasizing hand washing. When arriving at the preschool, each child will be encouraged to wash their hands. Your participation will certainly assist us with this health program.

Emergency Care

In the unlikely event of a medical emergency, preschool staff requires authorization from the child’s parent or legal guardian to take appropriate action. Please fill out and return to us an Emergency Card, which provides us with emergency contact information as well as consent to take your child to the nearest emergency service if we ever need to. Simply click the following link to open the form in Adobe Reader, or right-click on the link to save the file to your computer. If you do not have Adobe reader, you can get it here for free.

Download the SSCP Emergency Card (PDF, 20KB)

When A Child Should Stay Home

There are three important issues in determining when a child is too ill to attend preschool:

The protection of the other children from a communicable disease
The comfort and safety of the child who is ill
The capacity of the preschool to look after an ill child

With these issues in mind, the following guidelines are given:

Any child too ill to participate in normal activities of the program should stay at home.
Children with upper respiratory infection, but no fever need not be excluded for the protection of the other children. Respiratory viruses are so common that it does not make sense to single out or exclude those who exhibit minimal symptoms.
Children on antibiotics who don’t have a fever and are otherwise well need not be excluded.
Children with suspected or known measles, mumps, rubella or chicken pox should be excluded until non-infectious. Children with generalized rash and fever are suspected of having measles and should be excluded pending diagnosis.
In addition to the illnesses mentioned in #4, there may be other less common communicable diseases which would necessitate exclusion for a period of time. In the case of diagnosed communicable diseases, the preschool should be notified.
Children with a chronic symptom such as a persistent cough or persistent fever warrant medical evaluation. Once an appropriate medical evaluation is obtained, they need not be excluded from the preschool unless they fall under the terms of #1, #4, or #5 above.
Whenever a child attending the preschool develops new symptoms of illness (mentioned above or not,) or has a worsening of symptoms, a parent will be notified to take the child home.
Children with gastrointestinal problems (i.e. vomiting, diarrhea, etc.) should be excluded from the preschool.

Administering Medication

Medication may only be given with parents’ written consent. Non-prescription medication can only be given if the physician also provides consent.