Sickness has been spreading during the flu season, as temperatures drop and people are sticking indoors, with a marked impact on schools.

Since many children can be less hygienic, the capability of a virus to spread throughout a school is high and can result in many absences in a short period of time.

That's why this November has been harder in terms of absences, with many schools reporting higher numbers of students having to stay home from school.

Southeast Cornerstone Public School Division Director of Education Keith Keating says that they may have gotten past the worst peak.

"We've seen an uptick in illness-related absences across the month of November. We kind of peaked around the month of November, and it seems like we're trending back down now."

That's also confirmed on the ground level, as Pleasantdale School Principal Michelle Smart says that attendance has been improving in Estevan.

"Lately attendance I feel like, has improved a little bit. We really went down in October and through most of November, there was a lot of staff, lot of students out. The last couple of weeks, I feel like our attendance has gotten better."

Keating puts the rate of absences across the southeast at a varying figure, that's usually somewhere in the double-digit percentages.

"It's really different across the division at this particular point in time, depending on the community. We've seen anywhere from 10 to 20, in some cases as high as 30 per cent absent rates as some of the schools. Over a short period of time, it tends to hit that high spike and come back down and then reestablish itself toward the end of November here."

Keating says that the division currently doesn't have any plans to change the school calendar and add more days in response to the absences.

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