cleburne isd

cleburne isd
All Cleburne ISD campuses closed for week because of probable swine flu cases

By Pete Kendall/reporter@trcle.com

School is out in Cleburne ISD.

Within hours of a preliminary decision Wednesday morning to shut down­ Cleburne High, TEAM School and Phoenix (formerly J.N. Long Elementary), CISD decided to close district-wide as a precautionary measure after four students exhibited symptoms of swine flu.

No cases had been confirmed, high school principal Monte Pritchett said, as he turned away cars Wednesday morning in the CHS parking lot.

kara kopetsky

kara kopetsky

On May 4, 2007, Kara Kopetsky, a 17-year-old high school junior in Belton, Missouri, was not having a good day.

She forgot one of her textbooks and called home and asked her mom to drop it off at the school office. She also asked her mother to wash her uniform so she could work the 4 p.m. shift at Popeye’s Chicken.

Later that morning, Kara had an argument with one of her teachers in class, according to police and her family. Frustrated, she left campus about 10:30 a.m., ditching school for the rest of the day.

swine flu site cdc.gov

swine flu site cdc.gov

Google’s Flu Trends site, a product of Google.org, has been updating itself with the latest wire reports and provides a search window where people can type in their ZIP code and locate the nearest flu-shot distributor.

Flu Trends also describes how it tracks outbreaks. "We've found that there is a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms," reads an explanation on the site. "Some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening, and are therefore good indicators of flu activity. Our estimates, based on up-to-date aggregated Google search data, may indicate flu activity up to two weeks ahead of traditional flu surveillance systems."

However, the site still registers United States flu activity as "low." Areas of the country affected by the new strain of flu, particularly California and Texas, are also noted as having "low" activity. A graph on the site shows the level of flu-related search activity on a week-by-week basis.