At Rogers Park Elementary there is a nasty illness spreading around.

On Monday it left about 150 of just over 500 students and 12 teachers out sick on Monday, November 25. Officials at Anchorage School District said they don’t know exactly what it is, but they’re taking measures to eradicate the germs at the school that might be causing it.

According to Daniel Barker, the director of elementary education, the district believes this is an isolated case. No other schools are reporting similar numbers to absent students.

“We are working currently with the Alaska State Department of Health and Social Services to try and get more information, but as it stands right now, we just have the symptoms and the illnesses coming in,” he said.

The principal of the school sent out an email to the parents listing those symptoms. Barker said it sounds like the flu, but they don’t know for sure. The symptoms are fever around 102 degrees, headache, stomach ache, achiness, and being really tired.

Jay Burns can attest to that. He said his fifth-grader has been out sick and has been sleeping a lot.

“It is weird, once I heard how many kids were out of school, but they’re communicating about it well,” he said, “Sounds like they have a whole response plan that I didn’t know about but now I feel pretty good about it.”

That plan was relayed in the same email sent out on Friday, Nov. 22. In it, the principal said that crews would do an ‘extensive sanitation’ of all the surfaces that the kids touch like the doorknobs and tables.

Barker elaborated on what ASD is doing to get rid of the germs.

“Those folks worked really intensely to go over every touch surface that they have in the school. They used hospital-level cleaning procedures to get it as clean as we can,” he said.

Since children and teachers will still be going in and out of the school, Barker said they will continue to send in cleaning crews each night after the students go home for the day to clean all those surfaces again.

Additionally, he said the teachers have been given disposable wipes and a lot of extra hand sanitizer to keep the children as germ-free as possible during the actual school day.

While the bug is going around the school, Barker stresses for parents to keep their children at home even if they’re only feeling a little sick. At this point, he said it’s more important for them to get healthy and get back to school in fit shape to learn rather than be there to hand in assignments on time.

Burns said that’s what he plans on doing with his 5th grader, and feels more at ease knowing it’s not just his child who is out sick missing school work.

“I was worried about her missing a lot of school, but you know, a lot of kids are missing a lot of school so we’ll figure it out,” Burns said.