School nurse Kathleen Kelly remembers the moment as a gratifying one.

A mother dropped by her son’s former grade school just to see the Downers Grove Grade School District 58 nurse.

“She popped in specifically to thank me for referring him,” Kelly said. “He failed the hearing screening for a couple years and at first she was annoyed with me because I kept bugging her to check it out.”

The mother told her the boy had suffered hearing loss and had needed a hearing aid, but now he was going off to college.

“She felt really and truly that he would have been one of those kids who fell through the cracks academically if that hearing loss had gone on for a longer period of time,” Kelly said.

Band-Aids to obesity

To Kelly and the other nurses of District 58 and Community High School District 99, identifying these medical problems are all in a days work.

The typical day begins and ends with staff meetings, but in between nurses are assisting children with tummy aches and bee stings. But sometimes the job is not that simple.

“I’ve had lots of parents thank me for different interventions that I kind of headed them in the right direction and it turned out their child did need something that helped them in the end,” said Carol Christofano, nurse for District 58.

And with the gratifying and happy memories also come the somber ones.
Christofano and District 58 nurse Susan Donahue remember cases of child abuse or child neglect, which they are required to report.

“That’s the worst,” said Christofano, an 18-year veteran, adding that luckily it does not happen often.

Kelly, Christofano, Donahue and Sue Zanotti, of District 99, all have their master’s degrees in nursing and have all worked in hospitals, but decided to leave and pursue school nursing.

“Most nurses think you can do a better job at preventing it at the ground level,” said Donahue. “You have a little more impact. It’s a different setting.”

Kelly has seen a rise in deadly food allergies, and Donahue said there is also more children with obesity and diabetes. With the rise of the information age, more parents are able to identify ADHD and other conditions, so a school nurse also has to know which children are medicated.

And with the flu season coming up, and the threat of swine flu, the nurses say they’re prepared.

“We’re concerned, but not alarmed,” Christofano said.
 
A firm foundation

The school-nursing practice launched on Oct. 1, 1902, when nurse Lina Rogers Struthers was assigned to serve four schools with 10,000 students in lower Manhattan as an experiment to see if school nurses could improve school attendance and children’s health, according to the National School Nurse Partnership.

Struthers wrote about that first year in her book “The School Nurse,” published in 1917:“An hour was devoted daily in each school to treatment of minor contagious diseases, such as ringworm, scabies, impetigo, and such conditions as inflamed eyes and discharging ears, to dressing sores, cuts and infected wounds, and to the inculcation of the oft-repeated lesson of personal cleanliness in the constant fight against pediculosis (lice infestation).”

There was a 90 percent drop in the absentee rate in the first year of the trial, according to “All Your Scrubs,” a Web site about medical apparel and the medical profession.

“The experiment was so successful, however, that the school board several months later began to supply funds and assigned nurses to more schools, totaling 27 nurses within six months,” stated the National School Nurse Partnership.

Struthers’ work in reducing school absenteeism due to communicable diseases led to
the employment of school nurses in New York City and across the United States.

Today, there are 66,171 school nurses in the country in public and private schools and other school health services, according to “The Condition of Education (2009),” a publication of the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.

According to the Illinois State Board of Education, schools in the Land of Lincoln employs 989 nurses (although some may not be working full-time). In 1999, there were 926 school nurses in the state.

Keeping track of work

School nurses have their days full with upset stomachs and sometimes lice, but there is also much paperwork and record keeping that goes into the job. The nurses said they keep record of what immunizations and physicals students have had. The paperwork is all done in between attending to students.

Zanotti said that she has a very busy health office given she is one of two nurses at Downers Grove South High School. The school has about 3,200 students and more than 400 staff members.

“It’s not unusual for us to have 100 to 125 kids a day walking into the nurse’s office for advice, first aid, testing or whatever they might need,” Zanotti said.
In between nurses have to fit in room for record keeping and in addition educate staff on how to handle medical emergencies.

“In the fall it’s getting acquainted with those students who do have medical needs,” Kelly said, “and what those needs are and making sure you plan for them.”