Milton mother Eileen Prybol didn't know a football player on her son's high school team had contracted a contagious and potentially life-threatening bacterial infection until she read about it last week in the newspaper.

In fact, Milton High School administrators didn't alert parents about the illness until after the article appeared — a full week after officials first learned of the spreadable, sometimes-deadly disease.

"I mean, we even got a letter [earlier this year] when mono was going through the school," Prybol said of the delay in notification. "It's just common sense. If the parents don't know that it's out there, then how can we watch for it?"

When it comes to alerting parents about contagious illnesses, school administrators don't always follow the same procedures. A parent may hear about incidents of mononucleosis at a child's school, but not more serious diseases, such as the estimated dozen drug-resistant staph infections recently reported in Atlanta and Cobb, Fayette, Fulton and Henry counties.

Part of the reason for the discrepancy is because infected students may not have been ill at school and were treated before they returned. But another reason appears to be a lack of uniform guidance from county or regional health departments, which school administrators rely on when they have students with infectious diseases.

In the Cherokee County School District, lead nurse Gwen Chambers refers to a list of 10 communicable diseases that she said North Georgia Health District officials have asked her to report to them.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the tough-to-treat germ causing the recent infections, is nowhere on the list — even though the state Division of Public Health requires that authorities be notified of illnesses caused by the drug-resistant bacteria.

"We have not received any word from district health to report this as a common communicable disease," Chambers said.

A spokeswoman for the health district, headquartered in Dalton, could not explain why the school system is asked to report some infectious diseases but not others, such as MRSA, which was added to the state's list of so-called notifiable diseases three years ago.

But state and local public health officials themselves differ on when those staph infections need to be reported. Experts at the state office said MRSA-related staph infections need to be reported only when there's been a severe case resulting in hospitalization or death or a series of milder cases that appear to be linked.

However, Dr. Steven Katkowsky, director of public heath at Fulton County's Department of Health and Wellness, said he wants to know about every case regardless of the severity. Otherwise, he said, outbreaks may be missed.

"If you're seeing one case, do you know if that's part of a cluster?" he said. "[Only] reporting clusters presumes that the same person is going to see all of the cases, which to me seems a little unlikely."

In recent weeks, public school students throughout metro Atlanta have been diagnosed with staph infections similar to the bacteria that killed a high school student in southern Virginia last week. At least 23 local cases have been reported this school year — though not all have been confirmed as the type that resist treatment with common antibiotics.

School officials say student staph infections, which often look like spider bites, are common. And medical experts say the type that are resistant to treatment are increasing. Still, notification of parents or teachers doesn't seem to be the norm.

Last year, three public school students at three different campuses in Atlanta were diagnosed with MRSA — all of which, administrators said, were reported to the county health department. None of the cases, however, were reported to parents at the affected schools because officials considered them "isolated" incidents.

Yet last week, when Atlanta officials learned one student at Southside High School had the staph infection in another apparently isolated incident, the principal sent a letter to parents the same day.

What was the difference?

According to Atlanta administrators, the "heightened awareness" brought on by the media.