Manhattan’s famous Fieldston School has an outbreak of lice

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By Jon Levine and Matthew Sedakka

May 20, 2023 | 12:49 p.m

A posh New York City prep school is in the midst of a major lice outbreak — and one expert says classrooms across the city are fighting the bugs.

On Monday, the Manhattan campus of Tony Ethical Culture Fieldston School brought in a louse machine to check students for bugs, according to the school newsletter. It is unclear how many students were affected by the invasion.

Adie Horowitz, owner of Licenders, the company that checks Fieldston students, said after a brief coronavirus hiatus, lice are returning to city schools with a vengeance.

“Practically all schools have epidemics. It’s only because they don’t show it since September after the kids come back with the film after summer camp,” Horowitz said. “The best a school can do is periodic screenings four times a year. . . it’s what schools were doing before COVID,” he said.

Horowitz declined to comment on the Fieldston infestation.

At Fieldston, where annual tuition costs a staggering $60,595 a year, parents and insiders alleged that administrators initially refused to conduct school-wide testing of students and delayed notifying parents of the incident.

“The school is concerned about the exposure and wants to contain the story,” and parents are “very disappointed,” he said.

“There would be a community uprising if the school continued to sit on their hands,” the insider said, adding that at least 15 families in the third grade were affected by the lice outbreak on May 11.

Unreserved parents at the school said the contagion likely spread because of the mixed response.

Head lice are parasitic insects found on the head, eyebrows and eyelashes that feed on human blood several times a day. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A spokeswoman for Fieldston said the school “reacted quickly and followed our extensive lice protocol,” including having school nurses check on students in affected classrooms and notifying their families within 24 hours of the first case, and then hiring a lice exterminator for further testing.