A day care center at Santa Monica High School was closed on Monday, the day after district parents were notified that a child in the facility’s infant-care program had been diagnosed with measles, officials said.
Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District staff were notifying parents of children in the program and asking them to monitor their children for potential symptoms of the measles, Superintendent Sandra Lyon wrote in an email Sunday.
“We also are working with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to monitor the situation and to determine next steps,” Lyon wrote.
All fourteen infants in the program were placed under a 21-day quarantine, Pinsker said.
The toddler room, in which 12 children were enrolled, was expected to remain closed until at least Thursday.
All returning toddlers would have to show documentation from a doctor proving they had received their first measles vaccine.
“I’m not concerned for my kid because I immunized her,” parent Tracy Saltzman said. “I just feel bad for those people that … they’re just putting everyone else at risk. So that makes it a little sad for everybody in the community, especially the teachers that have their kids at the day care and the single parents who have their kids in the day care.
“It’s scary,” she said. “I mean, that’s a really scary disease.”
The announcement comes less than two weeks after students and parents were informed that a baseball coach at Santa Monica High had contracted measles.
School and health officials determined that every player on the baseball team had been immunized for the virus. No students were asked to stay away from the campus as a result of the coach’s condition.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 102 people in 14 states were reported to have measles in January, most of them stemming from an outbreak linked to Disneyland in Anaheim in mid-December.
CNN staff contributed to this report.
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