DEARBORN HEIGHTS — Last Wednesday over 200 students and dozens of staff members started getting sick during the school day at Annapolis High School, located in District 7 of the city. After school, more students and staff members reported illnesses from home, which included vomiting and diarrhea and other flu-like symptoms. 

According to doctors and health officials, a norovirus may be the cause of the problem. It was the same bug that had sickened 28 hockey players in Taylor last March. The virus is able to spread from the intestinal tract and can spread very easily when hands are not washed, making it easier to contaminate food and other surfaces.

On Thursday, the district contacted the health department to prepare to run a test on the school, which closed on Friday to allow students and staff members to recover from the illness and stop it from further spreading. Cleaning at the school included disinfecting and running air scrubbers to filter the air. 

“They put in approximately 200 man hours of cleaning hours alone, and then they came back Saturday,” Jeff Bartold, superintendent of Dearborn Heights District 7 told reporters. “I think we’ve done everything we possibly can do at this time. Hopefully we got the bug out of there and we can move forward,” he added.

Annapolis High School

Other schools in the district were also cleaned out to avoid any possible spreading of the illness, which could’ve targeted siblings of ill students who attended the middle schools and high schools. Stool samples were sent to the state health department to help identify the type of illness that had struck the school.  

Dearborn Public Schools, neighboring to Dearborn Heights, also took additional steps to make sure the illness had not spread over into their district. Dearborn Public Schools spokesman Brian Mustonen confirmed that a couple of weeks earlier there was a higher than usual number of kids who were out sick with flu-like symptoms at Stout Middle School, but the building was cleaned over that weekend as well.

On Monday and Tuesday, students returned back to Annapolis High School despite a still lower than usual turnout. Bartold says they are hoping things will get back to normal, especially after thanksgiving break, which will give ill students more time to recover.