As I was on the bus on Tuesday, May 9th, I received an unpleasant text from my mother: my nine-year-old sister had lice, and I should go to the place where she was to get checked. I was already dreading the check, completely against the idea of sitting in a chair for three hours straight while my scalp got attacked. I pushed myself into a state of denial; my mother had always been terrified of lice since her own sister had chronic cases for years on end. Besides, I thought of myself as immune, since I’ve escaped close encounters many times before. I guess that was just a lesson to never feel too confident.
At around 4:45, I arrived at Licenders, the lice-killing store located in Midtown. I was greeted by my mother and screeching siblings, as well as a classmate of my sister and her nanny. It became clear I was in for a long day when my dad got his hair checked before me, despite arriving later, because the staff at Licenders knew I would take long and wanted to get my dad out to clear space. It turns out he was the only one in my family without lice, and every other boy who entered the room had the same luck. Us girls were not so fortunate.
Besides my sister, four other third-grade girls entered with lice, and one boy without, all bringing their whole families. Unluckily for us, my family were the only relatives of a third-grade student to catch the lice. I completely blamed my sister for it, of course, and it didn’t help that I had to hear her and her friends sing a “licey” rendition of the Ghostbusters theme song. “If there’s something crawling in your hair, and it gives you a scare, who you gonna call? Licenders!”
I overheard my mother conversing with the other parents, annoyed that Ethical didn’t bring back lice checks after Covid. It definitely wasn’t the first outbreak of lice, but it was the first after Ethical stopped giving biyearly checkups. My own grade had a skirmish with lice back in fourth grade, the week of the play when everyone was sharing microphones, but that got all cleared up quickly when the school brought lice professionals to comb through every student’s hair. They ended up doing the same thing the next day on Wednesday, a grade-wide check. While a bit late, they responded adequately to the situation and should continue to do lice checks on a normal schedule.
Despite continuing to wear buns and spray our hair with lice repellent, that seemed to be the end of it. Until May 17th, when my mother received a call from a journalist. She always picks up a call unless it is spam, and when she did pick up, a man asked her if her daughter went to Ethical Culture, if she would like to comment on the lice situation and if she had any quotes for his article. It felt quite “intrusive”, the questions he asked and the fact that a stranger had her phone number and knew where her daughter goes to school.
On May 20th, the New York Post reported on the outbreak. It turned out that four or five mothers of third-grade students were contacted by the Post, not all of whom had children with lice. None of them knew who gave their information to the journalist. My mother didn’t believe that it would be the staff at Licenders because they would lose business, so she assumed it must have been another parent. The whole thing just felt uneasy. It must have spooked others too, because I asked ten other parents to comment, all of whom declined.
The coverage of the lice outbreak provided more discomfort than the outbreak itself. As a school, Ethical Culture messed up. They made a mistake. They should have continued lice checks immediately after they went fully in-person. But to me, the lice outbreak doesn’t feel newsworthy. This newspaper would have likely not reported on it if the Post didn’t first. Now that the outbreak was written about publicly, it makes people uncomfortable to comment on it. Parents have the right to complain, but now they feel like they could be betraying the community, trying to humiliate it. The problem of lice has been fixed, but parents will now feel uneasy around each other, wondering who gave their information away and if they have to worry about their privacy any time something goes wrong.
