One student at Oak Park High School was confirmed to have the norovirus Tuesday, March 14.

Norovirus, also known as the “winter vomiting bug,” is a highly contagious virus that causes diarrhea, stomach pain, nausea and vomiting. A norovirus outbreak affected 500 students in the Rio School District in Oxnard during the first few weeks of March.

“Only one at OPHS has been [officially] diagnosed. We had about 12 other students at OPHS who had some of the symptoms but were not positively diagnosed,” Superintendent Tony Knight wrote in an email.

The district responded to news of the infection by having professionals disinfect as many surfaces in the school as possible.

“We spent [about] $12,000 to $15,000 [on] bringing in a company the Tuesday night and Wednesday night because we learned about [the confirmed case] on the Tuesday afternoon,” Principal Kevin Buchanan said.

According to Buchanan, the district sought to prevent significant numbers of student absences, which are detrimental to the students’ education and can also impact the school fiscally.

“Kids benefit from not losing instruction. That’s indispensable,” Buchanan said.

In addition to hiring a professional service to disinfect the school, the administration distributed flyers throughout the campus, emphasizing the importance of handwashing as a preventative measure. The district also kept tabs on student absences and how many of those could have been norovirus-related.

“Monitoring the situation [and] letting the public know what we’re doing, I think, is really important, [as well as] heightening the awareness of the importance of washing hands, and that’s about it really,” Buchanan said.

This is not the district’s first time responding to the virus. In 2012, approximately 150 students were absent at Medea Creek Middle School over four days following a norovirus outbreak.

In addition to threatening student health, outbreaks that lead to mass absences can impact the school financially due to a drop in Average Daily Attendance funding, which is directly proportional to the number of students present per day.

ADA equals about $8,000 per student per year if he does not miss any school days. Every day of absence results in a loss of about $33. The state pays the ADA funds to the County Office of Education, which then disperses those funds to individual districts. Then, from the district’s general budget, ADA funds are allocated to the schools. According to Medea Creek Principal Brad Benioff, ADA helps fund all personnel and facilities costs.

“The ADA goes to everything at the school site from a teacher’s salary to the paper towels in the restrooms,” Benioff wrote in an email.

During the Medea Creek outbreak, the potential loss of funds added a financial incentive — in addition to the health incentive — for the district to respond quickly and effectively.

“In 2012, the students who had the norovirus were eventually tallied at around 150, but many other students chose to stay home during the two weeks of the outbreak,” Benioff wrote. “We had two days of more than 300 students absent. If you take all these absences, each of the days, we probably lost close to $30,000 in ADA just from our site.”

This time, Buchanan said, Oak Park High School was more successful in containing the virus.

Sophomore Anish Natarajan said he supports the school’s precaution toward the situation.

“If the school’s been able to limit the number of infected to just one, then I can understand the spending since it was very effective and preserved instructional time,” Natarajan said.

Oak Park parent Sridhar Ramamurthy said he is appreciative of the school maintaining communication with parents about the outbreak.

“I was glad to see that the district communicated the norovirus event within a day of a confirmed case,” Ramamurthy wrote in an email. “As parents who expect this kind of school accountability, we also need to be responsible and keep [sick kids] home for the first few days of occurrence instead of sending them to school, which exposes other kids to the virus or bacteria.”