Letters
I Disagree With Your Viewpoint That a Nurse in Every Public School is a Sick Idea
By Lauren M. Brown, RN, MS, NCSN
Feb 25, 2009 - 12:46:18 PM

Mr. Zizza,

I appreciate your openness and willingness to question politicians as evidence by your recent article in the Magic City Morning Star titled "A Nurse In Every Public School Is A Sick Idea." However, I must respectfully disagree with your viewpoint. There are many research articles that speak to the effect a school nurse has on student achievement. Over the recent years, the CDC, American Academy of Pediatrics, and other well respected groups have supported nurses in schools. The National Association of School Nurses and Healthy People 2010 recommend that one school nurse be present for every 750 well students. Now, putting all the collective intelligence, research, and good common sense aside, I'd like to share a few statistics with you from my school nursing staff.

• During the 2007-08 school year we had 14 school nurses who served 14,000 students.
• We saw roughly 41,000 students for illness, injury, acute medical needs.
• We only gave 18,226 doses of medication to students (yes, this included our "allegedly ADHD students" that you fear we would be paying nurses "to medicate"). This number included medications for ADHD, asthma and epinephrine for emergency situations, insulin for the diabetics, and general over the counter medications for minor illness (headaches, sports injuries, etc.).
• 17% of our students had special health needs that impacted them during the day (needing specialized nursing care like catheterization, blood sugar checks, etc).
• Out of all the students we saw in the clinics we sent 92% of them BACK TO CLASS healthy and able to learn (and therefore there were 92% of the parents who were not asked to leave work, lose wages and potentially their job because the school nurse was able to assess their child and intervene immediately).

Things that I did not mention here are the "extras" you seem to be forgetting. For example, helping students and families in need find assistance with clothing, food, medical care, etc., emergency planning for schools to handle possible school shooting/violence and natural disaster incidents, health education classes taught by the nurses in order to help our students become healthier citizens (and less likely to be dependent on our "big brother" medical system), and the list goes on...

I suggest that you see what it is like to be a school nurse. Follow one for a day. Be coughed on, thrown up on, asked to race to the playground to care for a broken bone. Better yet, be the one bright spot in the day of a child who has few friends at school, doesn't have a relationship with their teacher and just comes to you for a friendly face. So, before you go around disparaging the school nurses who would "cost the taxpayers 20 million," do a little bit of research.

Sincerely,

Lauren M. Brown, RN, MS, NCSN
Cincinnati, Ohio