This week has been a crash course in explaining pandemic school safety. There are wide gaps in the understanding of both staff and parents/guardians about what happens when students exhibit potential symptoms of COVID during the school day. When students are sent home whether for symptoms or a close contact, the frustration and anger is often directed at the school nurse. Cursing out the school nurse should never be normalized, accepted or ignored. Too many of our colleagues are resigning because of intolerable working conditions.
The trends I am seeing are parents sending kids to school while pending COVID tests. This was the majority of the cases we saw this past week. When the test comes back positive and the student is in school and has been, it creates a cascading effect of contact tracing with possible look back up to 48 hours depending on circumstances. The close contacts of this student are then sent home. One worry is that we are not finding out about positive adult cases in students’ households.
After our first week with students, I am wiped out. I would love to crowdsource requests from school nurses to our parents/guardians about what they can do to help us keep their children/teens safe. I will never use anyone’s name or school district/state but would like to share your suggestions/requests/pleas in a blog post. Please help me add to the suggestions I posted in the Tweet below by emailing me: relentlessschoolnurse@gmail.com
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