School Nurses Teaching Lifesaving Skills to Children

A scary moment in the home.

One weekend morning, my then-six-year-old son ran into the kitchen holding a half-eaten piece of fruit and looking panicked. He and his brothers had just finished eating breakfast before rushing off to play a game in the next room. Only a faint wheeze emerged when my son tried to breathe. He was choking.

Years earlier, my husband and I had taken a cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and first aid class for new parents taught by paramedics and nurses at our local community center. We immediately used techniques we’d practiced in that class to successfully dislodge the food, and our son recovered fully. That long-ago instruction had not only given us the knowledge needed to clear our son’s airway but also the confidence to do so calmly during a frightening moment.

A 4th-grader learns proper technique for chest compressions and how to use an AED. Photo by Dulce Rodriguez.

Collaborating with the community to empower students.

In our May issue In Our Community column, nurses in the Klein Independent School District in Harris County, Texas, describe how they have been instilling this combination of […]

Message from a Concerned School Nurse

Robin Cogan

In case you have not seen the new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines for schools, published on August 11, 2022, here they are: Operational Guidance for K-12 Schools and Early Care and Education Programs to Support Safe In-Person Learning.

Key changes in CDC guidance for schools.

The CDC has chosen the path of least resistance as schools are about to reopen or are in their first few weeks of the new school year. Although the word “prevention” is included in the CDC’s name, this central goal seems to have been removed from these guidelines, including crucial pieces of the mitigation strategies that in the past prevented the school-level spread of the virus:

  • The recommendation to cohort has been removed—its absence will increase class sizes, removing a layer of mitigation.
  • The recommendation to conduct screening focused on high-risk activities during times of high COVID-19 spread or an outbreak has been changed, mostly leaving it up to individual districts to determine what constitutes an outbreak, with little guidance from local health departments.
  • The recommendation to quarantine has been removed, except in high-risk congregate settings. I would suggest that schools are congregate settings. We can quibble about use of the term “high-risk,” but we certainly do have high-risk staff, students, and community members […]

School Nurses: A ‘Hidden Health Care System’ Finds a Voice

A blog is born.

Five years ago, I attended a blog writing workshop at the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) annual conference. It was led by Margaret Cellucci, the former director of communications for NASN. The hands-on workshop was a primer on blogging and included an assignment that the participants needed to submit a blog post about their conference experience before the end of the event. That is how The Relentless School Nurse blog was born. Five years, 818 blog posts, and almost 400,000 views later, I can say with confidence that school nursing is a vibrant and innovative specialty practice.

Amplifying the voice of school nursing.

My aim has been to amplify the voice of school nursing. At first, I focused on sharing stories from my health office. But soon I wanted to spotlight school nurses from around the country who were doing amazing things but did not have a national platform to share their experiences. As my readership grew, so did my reach and within a short time, I was highlighting school nurses from coast to coast.

To tell our own stories—not to boast but to educate.

Recognition in school nursing, like in most nursing, has been hard-fought, both within our own walls and outside as well. So many […]

2022-05-11T10:32:27-04:00May 11th, 2022|COVID-19, Nursing, school nurses|1 Comment

School Nurses During COVID-19: Still Holding the Line

Anything but the normal school year we’d hoped for.

The 2021-2022 school year is upon us and it is anything but the normal year many of us had hoped for. For some kids, it will be the first time going back into the classroom after 18 months at home. As a mom of two kids under 12 who cannot yet be vaccinated, it is a time of anxiety as I send my kids into school with a more contagious COVID-19 variant. Despite the mitigation efforts put in place, I wonder if it will be enough.

In parts of the country, cases are still skyrocketing and hundreds of kids have already had to quarantine or switch to remote learning. Some states have layers of mitigation in place in their schools, while in others, governors are fighting to keep schools from instituting mask mandates. And through this all, the person at the front line is the school nurse.

School nurses on the front lines as the rules keep changing.

In our August issue, AJN Reports highlights how school nursing has changed amid the current pandemic. Adding to the many other challenging tasks that school nurses already have is

  • having to interpret guidelines from the CDC; educate students, staff, and families on disease prevention;
  • set up in-school systems to screen, test, and isolate […]

School Nurses as the New Front Line in the Struggle to Contain COVID

School nursing services did not end when our brick-and-mortar buildings closed in March because of COVID-19.

School nurses continued to provide a full spectrum of care in the most innovative ways. We supported parents as they grappled with the enormity of the sudden pivot to remote learning and linked parents and students to community resources that school nurses know so well. We continued care coordination, working with our most vulnerable students and families; created pathways to provide virtual school nursing services; and provided health education. Certified school nurses became contact tracers, delivered meals to students and families, and explained the transition from in-person medical appointments to telehealth. And we continue to support our parents in scheduling much-needed physicals and immunization updates before school reopening.

The front line of our struggle with COVID will now be at school and school nurses will be the first responders. Students and staff with one or more COVID symptoms may be asked to isolate for a minimum of 10 days following department of health guidelines. There will be mass absenteeism of both staff and students, as close contacts for those who have tested positive will also have to quarantine for 14 days.

This information has not been communicated clearly and consistently on a statewide level to our school communities. Youth community spread of the virus is already here and we are in an ever-changing landscape in terms of COVID-19 containment—we are chasing this virus and the virus […]

2020-08-12T09:20:23-04:00August 12th, 2020|Nursing, Public health, school nurses|1 Comment
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