Sick School Syndrome
Many of the nation’s schools have poor ventilation and significant sources of pollution inside the buildings, which can be a serious problem for children with asthma; in particular, indoor pollutants can be a problem. When a building has indoor air problems, it is known as a “sick building.” When a school is deemed sick, it means that the people inside experience health problems that have no other obvious cause and that these symptoms or problems disappear or improve when they leave the building. According to a 1995 federal government survey, half of all schools in the country were sick schools.
Diagnosis
There are no strict criteria for diagnosing sick school syndrome; health experts make a diagnosis by examining the child and assessing whether the symptoms seem related to being in school. Sick school syndrome is often wrongly blamed for several illnesses and disorders ranging from INFLUENZA to ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER. Therefore, it is important for health experts to look for other explanations for a child’s symptoms before attributing them to the school environment.
Written Expression Disorder
Written Expression Disorder is a problem in producing writing that do not seem to be linked to a child’s overall intelligence. Individuals with writing disorders typically have problems in several areas of writing, such as sentence structure, punctuation, spelling, or generating ideas and language in written form. Their ability to express concepts in writing may generally be far more limited than their ability to do so in spoken language, or it may be consistent with their oral-language functioning.
In some cases the quality of the writing produced may be the primary difficulty; this might include problems with syntax, word meanings, spelling, grammar, or structure and organization. In other cases, some children have problems with the ability to produce written text fluently and continuously in response to prompts; in this case, the child may be able to produce good writing sometimes, while at other times be unable to respond effectively at all.