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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Published by Robin Cogan, MEd, RN, NCSN, FNASN, FAAN
Robin Cogan, MEd, RN, NCSN, FNASN, FAAN, is a Nationally Certified School Nurse (NCSN), currently in her 22nd year as a New Jersey school nurse in the Camden City School District. Robin is the Director for New Jersey to the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) Board. She is proud to be a Johnson & Johnson School Health Leadership Fellow and past Program Mentor. Robin is the honored recipient of multiple awards for her work in school nursing and population health. These awards include, 2019 and 2020 National Association of School Nurses President’s Award, 2018 NCSN School Nurse of the Year, 2017 Johnson & Johnson School Nurse of the Year, and the New Jersey Department of Health 2017 Population Health Hero Award. Robin serves as faculty in the School Nurse Certificate Program at Rutgers University-Camden School of Nursing, where she teaches the next generation of school nurses. She was presented the 2018 Rutgers University – Camden Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award for Part-time Faculty. Robin writes a weekly blog called The Relentless School Nurse. She also writes a monthly column in My American Nurse, the official journal of the American Nurses Association. Robin’s work is included as a case study in The Future of Nursing Report 2020-2030. You can follow Robin on Twitter at @RobinCogan.
View all posts by Robin Cogan, MEd, RN, NCSN, FNASN, FAAN