My kids’ schools have no nurse, does yours?

Who wants to pay less taxes?

Who wants the government and regulation off our backs?

Government and school payrolls are much too big, let’s stop using our taxes to pay big government salaries!

Careful what you ask for.

Do you remember the good old days when there were school nurses? In the sixth grade, my throat burned and my head ached. I was sent to the school nurse where she took my temperature, gave me some water and a throat lozenge that tasted like cherry. The cold nurses cot lined with that crinkly white medical paper was somehow a comforting place to rest as I waited for my mom to come pick me up.

In the ninth grade I passed out in hygiene class and had to be wheeled through the hallway – of course during the change of classes – to the nurse’s office.  There the nurse checked my vitals, my blood pressure and my temperature, etc. and sent me on my way back to classes after she determined my cause of fainting was due to me being grossed out by the day’s lesson.

As a mother, my children made several trips to the nurse’s office in the years they were students in New York State:

• There were routine eye and hearing exams
• Lice checks when there was the monthly…. emmm, occasional outbreak in one of their classes
• When my daughter’s 2nd grade head collided with another 2nd grade head, it was the nurse’s office who called me saying I would need to take my daughter to an ENT specialist to rule out a broken nose
• My oldest son broke several body parts at school. It was a nurse who was trained to triage him and fix him up enough to make him comfortable until i could get him to the doctor’s office.
• My youngest son had an asthma plan in his old school in New York where he went to the nurse’s office each day before recess or gym to take his inhaler.
• The nurse in my youngest son’s school also extracted a tick from my son’s neck, contained it in a plastic jar for me to take to my doctor to test it for Lyme’s disease. She was my hero! 

The beginning of the school year I called up to speak to the school nurse at my son’s middle school about my son’s inhaler.

6th Grader Laporshia Massey Dies From Asthma Complications 

This is a school where we got a note home the first day of school saying that NO child could bring in any products containing nuts because several children in the school contained a life-threatening THAT’S LIFE THREATENING peanut allergy.

Philadelphia Child Dies, No School Nurse Available

“We don’t have a nurse,” the secretary said in matter-of-fact tone.

“Excuse me?” I stammered in disbelief.

She calmly said that the school has a clinic where moms volunteer their time. Or, she, the secretary, plays the role of the nurse, distributing medication and other nursing functions.  I’m sure she has time to care for our children, especially during cold and flu season, plus get all her other work done.

Really. So very comforting that is, never knew a school administrator knew how to take a kids vitals or how to treat a wound, a bone break or properly give out meds in addition to paperwork and calendar scheduling.

I shared my dismay with another school administrator, this time at my daughter’s high school.

“Oh yeah, our district hasn’t had nurses in a very long time. It’s an enormous liability.”

Yeah, do you think?

In New York, our property taxes were pretty high. In Michigan, our taxes are quite low. Our suburban streets are quite pock-marked with potholes and our schools have no nurses. And that’s the way people like it here, I guess.

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