Area school nurses dispense more than medicine

From behind her purple-dotted spectacles, Joyce Jones levels her gaze at the teenagers.

“Did you eat this morning?” she asks one student in her office.

“Did you take your medication?” the gray-haired nurse quizzes another, using her desk chair to slide and pivot for maximum efficiency.

Jones doesn’t brook much visible sympathy for kids trying to get out of class, but evidence suggests she’s won the affection of some at the William Campbell Combined School in Campbell County.

There are the love notes scrawled by students on the message board in her office. And there’s the testimony of her bosses, middle school principal Fran Wydner and Campbell County Director of Pupil Personnel Services Cindee Pletke, who seemed a little jealous of the students who got to spend time in Jones’ care.

It’s a given that students will come to Jones looking for positive attention — it’s no less a part of her job than handing out inhalers or filling out forms. These days, she and other Central Virginia school nurses must tackle modern-day challenges like swine flu and the rapid rise of student allergies and do so as schools face increased pressure to cut non-classroom personnel. But all that comes on top of a more basic function.

“Everybody wants to be needed, and everybody wants to be loved,” Jones said. “Sometimes they come here to get it.”

Different school divisions here in Central Virginia have different systems when it comes to school nurses. In Lynchburg, middle and high schools have nurses and the elementary schools have school health aides, usually with less extensive medical training.

Marilyn Gordon, nurse coordinator for the Lynchburg City Schools, said that the system works, but that the health aides need more help from her than do the nurses, who are usually more self-sufficient.

In Campbell County, there is currently no person whose job is solely to supervise the nurses, but each school has its own school nurse, elementary schools included. According to Pletke, the program was instituted 12 years ago, much to the relief of principals, teachers, clerical aides and secretaries who’d borne responsibility for handing out medications and dealing with health issues previously.

“It is very reassuring to have a medically trained person in all their schools,” Pletke said. “We find that they are just invaluable.”

Lately, both systems have been making a major push to react to the H1N1, or swine flu, virus. School nurses are playing a vital role in providing education about the virus in the schools, responding to sick students and helping to prepare for the upcoming swine flu vaccinations set to begin in the Lynchburg City Schools this week and in Campbell County the last week in October.

“Everybody is really worried about the flu,” said Melissa Devening, school nurse at Linkhorne Middle School in Lynchburg. “Even some teachers worry … every time students cough in class, they send them to the clinic.”

Robin Mattox, school nurse at Altavista Elementary in Campbell County, has been sending kids home with fevers but also educating students and teachers about what they can do to prevent the flu — for example, instructing students how to cough and blow their noses.

When school nurses aren’t dealing with temporary illnesses or infections they are often helping students with chronic conditions such as asthma, diabetes and allergies.

At Leesville Road Elementary School in Campbell County, school nurse Brenda Tucker has her hands full at lunch time, figuring out the likely carbohydrates in each of her diabetic students’ meals and adjusting insulin pumps accordingly.

Tucker, who has been a nurse at Leesville for nine years, said she has seen an increase at the school in a variety of conditions, including diabetes, allergies, asthma and cardiac troubles, increases that have also been echoed at some other Campbell County schools.

In Lynchburg, Gordon had data to show that the number of students for whom the school system keeps EpiPen devices to treat severe allergies has risen sharply almost every year since 2002, with a 53-percent increase just since 2006. Asthma rates among students in Lynchburg have risen in the last three years but fluctuated over the decade as a whole. Diabetes rates have stayed about the same.

At Rustburg Middle School, school nurse Susan Brown said that sometimes students are willing to confide things in her that they haven’t yet told anyone else. For example, Brown said that at times over the course of her career she has been approached by girls who think they might be pregnant. Even if students approach her, Brown said, girls are sometimes hesitant to say aloud their concerns about pregnancy or menstruation issues.

“They just look at you like you are supposed to know what’s going on.” Brown said. “Once you say the word, they are like, ‘yeah, yeah, that’s what’s wrong.’”

And though school nurses may see students for just a few minutes during a day, some say they care so strongly about students in tough situations, the emotional impact runs far deeper.

“There have been tears and ‘I can’t believe someone would do this to a child,’” Mattox said. “I think it’s been my biggest reality check — how much some students live day to day and how much the students rely on the school system to take care of them.”