The Relentless School Nurse: 2025 – A Year When Stories Became Strategy

This year, The Relentless School Nurse reached nearly 100,000 views, not as a measure of popularity, but as evidence of connection. At a moment when public health, evidence, and even compassion are openly contested, those visits tell a different story: truth still travels, persistence still resonates, and care still draws people in. Each reader, share, and comment reinforces what I have long believed, that voice matters, and that what one nurse writes from a school health office or a kitchen table can ripple far beyond it.

2025 has felt like both a reckoning and a renewal. The year began with a promise to expand the work, stretch its reach, and lean into harder conversations about the politicization of school health. That promise became action through storytelling that confronted uncomfortable truths while holding fast to hope.

The most widely read post of the year, “The Relentless School Nurse: The Department of Education’s Policy Shift Undermines Nursing as a Profession”, reached nearly 23,000 readers. That response wasn’t just about a policy—it was about identity and survival. The U.S. Department of Education’s proposal to exclude nursing from the definition of a “professional degree” threatened to erase decades of preparation, leadership, and expertise, with real consequences for workforce pipelines, loan forgiveness eligibility, and student care. The collective outrage and advocacy that followed demonstrated nursing’s strength when voices unify across organizations, schools, and generations. Bureaucratic decree failed where professional solidarity prevailed.

This year, our stories confronted grief and systemic failure. Through the posts I chose to write, and the voices of readers, colleagues, and collaborators who engaged, shared, and contributed, the blog addressed school shootings, the erosion of health protections for children, and the persistent expectation that nurses “do more with less.” These stories documented existing advocacy, new partnerships, national recognition, published research, and ongoing dialogue about the realities of school nursing practice.

The year also built on the promise laid out in “A New Era in School Nursing, the 2025 Version”: choosing support over constant self-sacrifice, telling the truth about exhaustion, and naming the systems that must change so nurses and students can thrive. That letter to my 2025 self became a compass, reminding me to protect my own humanity even as I kept writing about how systems fail children.

As the blog closes its eighth year and surpasses half a million lifetime views, I’m reminded why this work began: to define school nursing from the inside, grounded in daily practice, rather than allow others to decide who we are or who we are not. What started in one health office became a space where school nurses could name their work in their own words and challenge policies and narratives that diminish it.

In 2025, that purpose carried new urgency. The stories shared here were not written for visibility or validation, but to document what is happening in schools and to insist that school nurses have a voice in defining their practice, their preparation, and their role in protecting children’s health. That work continues—because clarity, not silence, is what this moment requires.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and showing up. The stories of 2025 remind me that voice is our most renewable resource. In 2026, I’ll continue using mine and invite you to do the same. Our students need nothing less.