SOME 500 students and 20 teachers of Raffles Institution (RI) Boarding School have been quarantined for a week from Monday. Two confirmed Influenza A (H1N1) cases have surfaced there in the past few days.

The RI campus in Bishan, made up of the boarding school, secondary school and junior college, has 4,500 students.

Confining the boarders within the school reduces the inter-mingling that takes place when the students cross from one school to another for meals and activities, said a spokesman.

A check with 15 other schools and junior colleges indicated that the first day of Term 3 went mostly smoothly on Monday.

It was the first day, following the month-long school holiday, that the Ministry of Education's measures to limit the spread of H1N1 applied to the school-going population.

The schools reported that most students who had returned from vacations in flu-hit countries on or after June 22 were staying home, complying with the leave of absence granted them. They accounted for 2 per cent to 3 per cent of all students. A third of the schools contacted had one or two students who should have stayed home but turned up for school.

Some did so because their parents did not know about, or misunderstood the Education Ministry's instructions; others went to school hoping they would not be caught lying about their travel history. They were told to go home.

What can a school do? Nothing much, it seems. As Outram Secondary School's principal Choy Wai Yin said: 'We have to trust parents and we will do our best to monitor the well-being of our students.'

The schools reopened prepared on Monday: Many had had the premises disinfected, and on Monday put their students through a lesson on Influenza A (H1N1).

Education Minister Ng Eng Hen predicted on Monday that the closure of classes and schools 'will be quite a common occurrence' but that we ought to 'have life go on as normal', unless advised otherwise by health authorities.

Read the full story in Tuesday's edition of The Straits Times