Area college officials are telling students go home sick to avoid spreading illness in the close quarters of a campus community.

About 100 St. Norbert College students have returned home sick this semester, mostly due to flu-like symptoms, said Barbara Bloomer, director of health and wellness services. UWGB doesn’t have exact figures, but officials there have been telling students to go head home as well.

“If anybody does have the classic signs,” said Amy Henniges, director of the counseling and health center at UWGB, “of a temperature greater than 100 plus a cough, or a temperature greater than 100 plus a sore throat, we’re really promoting for them to go home-home and leave the campus situation.”

The average St. Norbert student who goes home ill is gone for about four days, Bloomer said. That means several days of missed class, but officials have been flexible in helping recovering students.

“Our faculty have been very, very good about assisting students and accommodating them and helping them get caught back up,” Bloomer said. “I think we’ve established the protocol early on, that students — we would help them to get home so they could have the care they needed at home.”

St. Norbert already has experienced two cycles of peaks and valleys related to flu-like illness, Bloomer said. During a peak, about 10 to 15 students might be home at any one time.

Meanwhile, both schools are out of seasonal flu vaccine and waiting for the H1N1, or swine flu, vaccines to arrive. UWGB has ordered about 300 doses of H1N1 vaccine, while St. Norbert is waiting for the OK from the state to order it.

The situation is nearly unparalleled in Bloomer’s 26-year career at St. Norbert, she said. Concerns over measles in the early 1980s presented similar challenges for health officials.

‘This is very sustained,” Bloomer said. “And from everything I’m getting from (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the Wisconsin Division of Health, this is going to be sustained for awhile”