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 potentially infectious students;
  • and assist public health departments investigating disease outbreaks in the school community.

Stretching thin resources to the breaking point.

In many schools, resources for the school nurse were already scarce.

“The workload is tremendous, it was tremendous prior to COVID,” says Robin Cogan, MEd, RN, NCSN, a school nurse in New Jersey’s Camden City School District and an AJN editorial board member. “There have been school nurses that have resigned, there have been school nurses that are taking early retirement, there are school nurses who will not be coming back next year.”

The report discusses staffing issues, contact tracing, mental health concerns for students, and more. It remains to be seen how this current year will play out. From this concerned mother, I’m hoping for a safe successful year and thank the school nurses for doing their part in keeping our kids safe and healthy.