Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
In this war, nurses eyed as ‘enemy’
Those in schools battling COVID-19 — and angry parents
When a junior high school student in western Oregon tested positive for the coronavirus last month, Sherry McIntyre, a school nurse, quarantined two dozen of the student’s football teammates. The players had spent time together in the locker room unmasked, and, according to local guidelines, they could not return to school for at least 10 days.
Some parents took the news poorly. They told McIntyre that she should lose her nursing license or accused her of violating their children’s educational rights. Another nurse in the district faced similar ire when she quarantined the volleyball team. This fall, after facing repeated hostility from parents, they started locking their office doors.
“They call us and tell us we’re ruining their children’s athletic career,” McIntyre said. “They see us as the enemy.”
Throughout the pandemic, schools have been the source of heated debates over the threat the virus poses and the best way to combat it. School nurses play a crucial role in keeping schools open and students safe but have found themselves under fire for enforcing public health rules that they did not make and cannot change.
This new academic year has been the hardest yet, they say. After a year of remote or hybrid learning, schools generally reopened at full capacity; many did so in the middle of the delta surge and in the midst of an escalating political battle over “parents’ rights” to shape what happens in schools.
Although 12- to 15-yearolds have been eligible for vaccination since May, uptake has been slow; just 48% of children in that age group have been fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The vast majority of elementary school students, who became eligible for the shots just two weeks ago, remain unvaccinated.
Nurses say they are juggling more COVID-19 cases and quarantines — and more furious parents — than ever. “I call myself a fireman and a dentist because I feel like I’m putting out fires and pulling teeth all day long,” said Holly Giovi, a school nurse in Deer Park, New York.
They are, they say, exhausted and overwhelmed. Some say that, for the first time, they hate their jobs, while others are quitting, exacerbating a school nursing shortage that predated the pandemic.
“I loved being a school nurse before COVID,” McIntyre said. Last month, she resigned.
Even before the pandemic hit, the job of a school nurse extended far beyond tending to playground scrapes.
School nurses manage chronic conditions, like diabetes and seizure disorders; perform vision, hearing and scoliosis screenings; ensure that students are up to date on vaccinations and physicals; assist with the development of personalized educational plans for students with disabilities; help students manage stress and anxiety; and more.
“You’re doing a lot more than Band-Aids and boo-boos,” Giovi said.
The majority of school nurses in the United States are responsible for covering more than one school, according to a 2018 study. (One-quarter of U.S. schools have no paid nursing staff at all.) Most make less than $51,000 a year.
“They were understaffed and overworked to begin with,” said Mayumi Willgerodt, an author of the study and an expert on school nursing at the University of Washington.
School nurses are now also managing isolation rooms for sick students, administering virus tests and logging the results, performing contact tracing and tracking quarantine periods, all while trying to reassure worried parents and keeping tabs on frequently changing guidelines.
Julie Storjohann, a school nurse in Washington state, spends her days toggling between numerous spreadsheets — for students who have symptoms of COVID19, students who have family members who tested positive and students who have been flagged as close contacts of other students with COVID-19, all of which have different quarantine and testing requirements. When a student tests positive, Storjohann begins a laborious contact-tracing process, which can include trying to determine whom the student sat next to at lunch or on the bus.
And while the COVID19 work can feel all-consuming, students still get bloody noses, skinned knees and head lice. “Or there’s a seizure in Room 104,” Giovi said. “Or the kid that’s got tree-nut allergies accidentally ate his friend’s snack, and you’re reading the ingredient list real fast. None of that stops.”
Erin Maughan, a school nursing expert at George Mason University, said many nurses were working nights and weekends for no extra pay and were feeling “moral distress” that they still could not get everything done.
The American Rescue Plan, this year’s COVID-19 relief bill, provides funds that school districts can use to hire more nurses, but many struggled to fill open nursing positions even before the pandemic. “There just aren’t people to take the job,” said Linda Mendonça, president of the National Association of School Nurses.
The pandemic has also turned school nurses into unwelcome public health messengers, especially when they tell parents that their children must stay home from school for two weeks.
They just basically hate you,” said Anne Lebouef, a school nurse in Louisiana, who said that she cries several times a week. “They’re yelling at you. They’re accusing you of fearmongering.”
Nurses emphasized that not all parents were hostile and that they understood why so many parents are frustrated and upset. Lebouef said she had students who missed more days of school than they attended because of exposures and quarantines.
“I feel like a terrible person for cheating these kids out of an education,” she said.
Other nurses have had enough. “For the same pay that we were getting before COVID, having to deal with twice the workload is just too much,” said McIntyre, who will start a new job as an operating room nurse in December.
The vaccination of children younger than 12 could alleviate the strain on some school nurses, especially if it reduces the number of students they have to send home from school. (Students who are fully vaccinated do not need to quarantine, the CDC guidelines say.)
Still, as the pandemic smolders on, school nurses had two urgent pleas for parents: to keep their children home when and — especially, they said — to be kind.
“We’re doing the best that we can do,” Storjohann said, her voice trembling.