Four of the five children just removed from the Ebola watch list headed back to their Dallas elementary schools Monday, as school officials promised to make them feel welcome in class following their three-week quarantine.
"We want the students to feel that it is school as normal, that they are not being singled out," said Dallas Independent School District's superintendent Mike Myles.
The names of the five children, cleared Monday after showing no signs of the virus for 21 days, have not been released, but officials say their classmates likely know who they are anyway. They don't want the five children to feel ostracized.
Parents picking up their children as school let out at L.L. Hotchkiss Elementary on Monday had mixed feelings about the possible lingering Ebola risks.
Some told NBC 5 they pulled their kids from school for a few days when they learned that a classmate may have been exposed, but now they feel better.
“I don’t have any worries. It has been long enough,” one mother said.
Another, however, wasn't as confident. "I am very concerned," she said.
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Officials had said earlier in the day that the cleared children would return to school Tuesday, but after they were cleared, four of them returned earlier than expected.
“We had asked that they return to school tomorrow just to make sure everything is coordinated well, but they showed up today, and that is fine. We didn’t want to turn them away. They are cleared, and what cleared means is they don’t have the virus,” Myles explained.
Although the other four children cleared headed back to class Monday, the son of initial Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan's fiancee Louise Troh did not go to back to Tasby Middle School, though he too was cleared.
