The Relentless School Nurse: Expanding Advocacy and Storytelling on Substack

The Relentless School Nurse blog is adding Substack, and you’re invited to come along so the stories, hard questions, and hard‑won hope from school health can travel even farther, deepen our conversations, and connect this community in new ways. This website will continue as the home base for our growing archive of work.

How we started

The Relentless School Nurse began with a restless question: How can we effectively tell the story of school nursing? This space was created to say, “Here we are. This is our work. This is what it looks like when school nurses stand in the gap for children, families, and communities.”

From the beginning, the blog has shared real stories from the frontlines, translated policy into plain language, and connected the dots between what happens in a nurse’s office and what happens in statehouses and school boards. Post by post, it has become a gathering place for people who understand that school nurses are public health leaders, educators, advocates, and essential members of every school team.

The journey of this blog

Over the years, The Relentless School Nurse has followed school nursing through some of the most challenging seasons: pandemics, gun violence, mental health emergencies, immunization debates, staffing crises, and the constant tension of doing critical work in systems that are stretched thin. This blog bears witness to those days—the grief, the resolve, the creativity, and the courage it takes to keep showing up.

Along the way, a community has grown around this work: nurses who print posts and bring them to staff meetings, colleagues who share links with, “You need to see this,” parents and educators who suddenly understand school nursing in a new way, and advocates who carry these stories into rooms where decisions are made. Together, this community has insisted that school health is not a side issue; it is the foundation of learning and justice for children.

Why add Substack now

Adding Substack is the next step in honoring that community and deepening the conversation. Instead of hoping you remember to visit the blog or that social media shows you what’s new, Substack will bring posts straight to your inbox, ready to read in the in‑between moments of your day. It will also open up more space for series, deep dives, and meaningful conversations in the comments.

The voice and values remain unchanged. The Substack will carry forward the same commitment to evidence, story, and advocacy—lifting up school nurses as experts, truth-tellers, and systems-changers, and centering the lives of the students and families they serve.

What stays the same, what grows

The Relentless School Nurse blog remains the home base and archive—the long hallway where years of stories, reflections, and resources live and can be revisited, shared, and cited. New posts will appear both here and on Substack, so the history of this work stays intact while the circle of readers expands.

What grows is the connection. Substack will make it easier for you to keep up, respond, and help shape what comes next. You’ll be able to share what you are seeing in your own school, suggest topics, and join conversations that remind you you are not doing this work alone.

Your invitation to the next chapter

If this space has ever made you feel seen in your practice, helped you find language for what you experience every day, fueled your advocacy, or given you a story to carry into a difficult meeting, the Substack is for you. Think of it as a new wing of the same building—a familiar place with more doors open, more chairs pulled up to the table.

The Relentless School Nurse will continue to say who we are: relentless advocates for children, guardians of public health in our schools, witnesses to both harm and healing, and leaders who refuse to give up on a more just, healthier future. The new Substack is simply the next chapter in that shared story, and you are warmly invited to walk into it with us.