Counselors and staff at Millicoma Intermediate School have been meeting with students at the Coos Bay school this week to help them cope with the death of an 11-year-old schoolmate.

Jennifer O'Fallon died Sunday of complications from an infection, but not meningitis as was initially suspected, according to public health and school officials.

"It is very rare for this to happen," said Donna Johnson, who is Coos County Public Health's communicable disease surveillance nurse.

On Sunday, the child was taken to Bay Area Hospital, where medical workers quickly went into action, notifying the health department they suspected Jennifer might have died of bacterial meningitis, a serious communicable disease. A department worker quickly contacted Coos Bay Schools Superintendent Jeremy Lyon, whose staff put the nurse in touch with families of Jennifer's classmates.

In the meantime, health care workers sent samples to a laboratory to try to pinpoint why the child became ill. Within hours, lab results showed it was not meningitis but a group A streptococcus infection that spread into her bloodstream.

Septicemia, as such a blood infection is called, is very unusual, Johnson explained. Its onset is rapid and massive, and sometimes a person can't overcome the disease.

"It is not something that the other children need to be tested for or need to have preventative antibiotics," Johnson stressed.

Once officials pinpointed the illness, the nurse apparently again called students' families telling them their children were not at risk.

"The other thing they advised us was there was no reason for students to stay home from attending school ... including the students from the classroom the girl attended," Lyon said Tuesday.

Since then, Millicoma's principal, Nancy Tedder, has been worrying about her students' emotional well-being. First thing Monday morning, Tedder held an emergency staff meeting, told her teachers about the tragedy and encouraged them to answer children's questions.

The school's counselor and counselors from elsewhere in the district came in to talk with kids. And Jennifer's homeroom classmates wrote notes to her on a big piece of paper.

"Yesterday they cried. Today they kind of celebrated her," Tedder said Tuesday.

For the health department's part, Johnson did offer parents some general health suggestions. Group A streptococcus is the same organism that can cause strep throat and that illness is spreading around in the community, as is chicken pox.

If children show symptoms of strep throat - such as headache, fever, sore throat and fatigue - Johnson is encouraging parents to call their health care providers and keep their children home from school.

The same goes for chicken pox, which she said can strike children who have been immunized or not.