LITTLE COMPTON — Suspected swine flu spread through the rural Wilbur & McMahon School last week, sending 80 elementary students — about a quarter of the school — home Friday with fevers, aches and coughs.

“All of it was flu-related,” said Principal James M. Gibney, who attributed the surge in illness to the school’s small size and the town’s tight-knit community, located at the end of a peninsula.

Students started getting sick on Monday and Tuesday and stayed out for several days in a row. “Parents said it was swine flu,” Gibney said.

The good news? Only 30 students were missing on Monday, “which means we’re pretty much on the mend,” he said.

Little Compton wasn’t alone.

On Friday, 23 schools reported an absentee rate of 20 percent or more. Of that number, nearly 70 percent were small elementary or kindergarten schools with fewer than 300 students.

Not every absence was tied to the flu.

At the tiny Nuweetooun School in Exeter, 6 of the school’s 12 students did not come to school Friday.

Only one student had the swine flu, said the school’s founder, Loren M. Spears. Another had a cold.

“There were a variety of issues that day,” Spears said. “But when you only have 12 students, you can reach a 50-percent absentee rate pretty quickly.”

The absences came during the same week that many eligible students –– an average of three out of four –– received swine flu shots at school vaccination clinics open from Nov. 2 through Nov. 6.

At the Wilbur & McMahon School in Little Compton, 87 percent of students were inoculated. But for many, the shots came too late.

The state Health Department plans to provide the vaccination to every public and private school in the state over the next few weeks, as long as vaccine supplies hold out.

When the clinics began on Monday, the state had a supply of 19,000 shots, but by the end of the week, another 14,600 had been made available, according to Health Department spokeswoman Carol Hall-Walker. As of Wednesday, about 9,000 children had received shots at school clinics.

The Health Department will release new school inoculation numbers Tuesday, she said.

pdavis@projo.com