The Relentless School Nurse: 2026 – This Is What School Nursing Needs From You

Note About This Series

Over the past years, The Relentless School Nurse has become a place where stories are told plainly—about what school nurses see, carry, and navigate inside systems that often overlook their role. Those stories were never meant to stand alone. They were meant to help us see patterns, name harm, and build shared language about what school nursing actually is.

This series marks a turning point.

The first piece, The Relentless School Nurse: 2025, A Year When Stories Become Strategy, looked back—at how storytelling created connection, visibility, and momentum. This letters looks forward—asking what responsibility comes with that shared understanding, and what it means to move from telling stories to building structure, protection, and collective action.

Together, these posts are an invitation: to reflect, to reckon honestly with where school nursing stands, and to consider what must change if children’s health, and the nurses who protect it, are to be supported in meaningful, lasting ways. 

Coming next: a letter about boundaries, discernment, and what it means to keep showing up without losing yourself. But first, a letter I wrote to 2026

Dear 2026,

You are arriving at a moment when school nurses are holding up more than any one profession should be asked to carry unsupported. You are inheriting the consequences of years of underinvestment, political interference in public health, and a dangerous reliance on personal sacrifice as the glue holding school health together. What you choose to do this year will either ease that burden or make it harder to bear.

By you, I mean the leaders, systems, and decision-makers who will shape what school health looks like in practice, not just on spreadsheets and trackers.

School nurses do not need more praise, posters about resilience, or messages calling them heroes while leaving the conditions of their work unchanged. They need you to deliver what previous years have promised but not fully realized: structure, protection, and a seat at the tables where decisions are made about children’s lives.

Here is what school nurses need from you, 2026.

1. Stop building school nursing on sacrifice

School nurses need you to end the myth that burnout is a personal failing and resilience is a private project. They are not leaving because they lack grit; they are leaving because the systems around them are unsafe, unsustainable, and misaligned with professional ethics.

In 2026, this means:

• Normalizing honest conversations about moral injury, not just “stress” or “fatigue,” and funding support structures that recognize it as predictable in under-resourced school health settings.

• Rejecting any initiative that frames resilience training as a substitute for adequate staffing, safe workloads, or fair compensation.

You cannot ask school nurses to keep absorbing structural failure and then applaud them for coping.

2. Treat school nursing as core infrastructure

School nurses need you to recognize that school health is not optional. When they are present, children gain access to care, chronic conditions are managed, and crises are contained before they spill into emergency departments. When they are absent, everything from attendance to safety to learning is at risk.

In 2026, this means:

• Committing to full-time school health services in every building—not one nurse stretched across multiple schools—with ratios that reflect the complexity of student needs.

• Funding school health services as ongoing infrastructure, not as short-term grants or “extras” vulnerable to budget cuts.

If your budgets do not reflect that school nursing is essential, your policies are saying the opposite, no matter what your statements claim.

3. Put school nurses in the rooms where decisions are made

School nurses need you to stop treating them as afterthoughts in policy conversations that directly shape their work: school safety, mental health, attendance, immunization, emergency planning, and more. Every time a decision is made without their input, it lands on their desk in the form of impossible expectations.

In 2026, this means:

• Ensuring school nurses have formal roles on district and state committees addressing school health and student support—with real authority, not symbolic presence.

• Building leadership pathways that allow school nurses to influence policy while remaining connected to practice, instead of requiring them to leave schools to be heard.

If you keep designing systems without them, you will keep creating work that depends on them while disregarding their expertise.

4. Protect their ability to speak up

School nurses need you to understand that advocacy is part of their job—not an act of disloyalty. When they raise concerns about unsafe conditions, inequitable policies, or gaps in care, they are doing exactly what they were trained to do: protect children.

In 2026, this means:

• Creating explicit protections for school nurses who speak up about student safety, access to care, and public health concerns, including clear anti-retaliation policies.

• Supporting professional standards that affirm the duty to advocate—even when that advocacy is uncomfortable for local or state decision-makers.

You cannot ask school nurses to be “trusted health professionals” and then punish them for telling the truth.

5. Honor nursing as a profession in policy and pathways

School nurses need you to affirm, in concrete ways, that nursing is a profession requiring additional education, ongoing learning, and appropriate authority. When policies downgrade nursing degrees or treat nursing as interchangeable labor, they undermine recruitment, retention, and public trust.

In 2026, this means:

• Supporting student loan and tuition policies that recognize nursing degrees as professional preparation and make school nursing a viable career path—not a financial hardship.

• Investing in school nurse pipelines, mentorships, clinical experiences, and academic partnerships, that prepare nurses for the complex intersection of public health, pediatrics, mental health, and education they navigate daily.

If you erode the professional footing of nursing, you erode the foundation of school health.

6. Use their stories as blueprints, not just inspiration

Over the past few years, school nurses have told the world what is happening in their offices and hallways: the children who fall through the cracks, the families navigating broken systems, and the colleagues stretched beyond their limits. Those stories have built connection, visibility, and shared language, and they have mapped exactly where the system is failing.

In 2026, you must treat those stories as blueprints:

• Turning lived experience into data-informed changes in staffing, policy, and training, rather than leaving them as moving anecdotes.

• Returning to nurses with, “Here is what we changed because of what you told us,” not just, “Thank you for sharing.”

Stories brought you to this moment. Strategy, grounded in those stories, must carry you forward.

2026, the most important thing school nurses need from you is this:

They need you to stop asking them to be the system.

They are ready to keep doing their part: to show up for children, to tell the truth, and to lead from the health office and beyond. But they need you to build structures that honor the responsibility they already carry, instead of expecting them to hold everything together through endurance alone.

If you can do that, if you can help move school nursing from hidden to recognized, from optional to essential, from resilience-first to structure-first, you will not just make this year easier for nurses.

You will make it safer for children.

That is what school nurses need from you.