When I was in high school back in the 1980s, our school had a nurse. I don't know if she was an LVN or an RN or something else, but she was most definitely a nurse--wore a white coat and cap and everything. If you needed medication, she kept it and administered it to you. If you had a headache, you went to her office and perhaps lied down on a bed for an hour or so; when your headache was gone you went back to class.
It was an eminently reasonable setup.
Fast-forward a few decades, and my school has a nurse--perhaps one day a week. What good is that? She has a small office--essentially a closet in our library, no room and no beds. What good is that? She does some paperwork.
You know who keeps and administers medication at our school? The principal's secretary. You know who's responsible for knowing what to do should any student with a known medical condition have an "issue"? The classroom teacher. Yes, we're sent a copy of the "student health plan". One I recently received gave step-by-step instructions on what to do if this particular student--what, I don't even remember now. Was it a bee sting? Was it some other allergy? I have 165 students a day, I'm supposed to memorize those for whom I've received a "health plan", and remember what's in it? I remember that this most recent health plan I was given included detailed instructions for using an epipen. There's no freakin' way. I'm not a medical professional. You can talk all day long about how a student's life may hang in the balance unless I act, but that's expecting too much of me. I'm not going to stab a kid with an epipen. I'm just not going to do it, Good Samaritan Law or no Good Samaritan Law. I don't have training, I don't want training. If I wanted that training I'd have majored in pre-med instead of math (not that West Point had a pre-med major, but that's not the point).
A few years ago there was concern about students who had seizures. I don't recall if there was a specific student in mind or if this was just a general concern, but that year seizures were the big bad. Apparently there is some medication, a gel that is inserted anally, that does something good for people having seizures. Anyway, our administration asked for volunteers to attend training on how to administer this gel to a student having a seizure. No one took them up on this generous offer. No teacher wants to be responsible for that. We accepted a job to teach, not to be a surrogate EMT.
Essentially, our district is being cheap and is trying to put this extra responsibility on us teachers instead of where it rightly belongs. You want to point fingers at me for not wanting to be medically responsible for students? Point fingers at my district for not putting a nurse at each school! Nurses know what to do, and in many cases they know what to do without thinking about it. During an emergency, I, on the other hand, would have to go to my file cabinet, determine if there's a health plan for a particular student, determine if the current emergency is the one mentioned in the student health plan, read step-by-step instructions, and then determine I'm not qualified (or not willing) to do some of the things in that plan. Time would have been better spent having the nurse rush over.
Eventually this broken system will have to change. Know when it will change? After some kid gets hurt by it. Some kid who should have had a nurse available will suffer, and only then will there be pressure on the district to do what's right. But it'll be too late for that kid, hopefully not too late for that kid.
At school we have kids with severe allergies and other severe medical conditions. If we're going to insist that those students be at a public school, we should staff that school appropriately.
8 comments:
Darren, I totally agree with your post with one exception in your particular circumstances. You were trained annually at a minimum at West Point and in the Army on the use of Atropine injectors. Please don't say you don't remember how to use them, they almost used themselves. Epipens are used exactly the same. To say you aren't going to use an epipen when needed is to say you refuse to use your training to do what you know you should.
The harder right ...
I remember atropine injector pens well. I always prayed I wouldn't have to use one in real life.
In Teaching in Australia, we have mandatory annual training, with online assessment for Anaphylaxis. We are required to have the training, and not having it can put your registration (authorisation to be a teacher) at risk.
This mandatory training is part of a suite of box-checking measures by government education authorities to transfer the responsibility and legal culpability away from them and their failure to provide adequate resources to meet the requirements they impose.
I can go through the training all day long....
I swear we teach in the same district. As I was reading the first couple paragraphs, remembering everything cause it happened to us too. I started to say ok, well I'm going to have to tell him how the district/school wanted teachers to insert gel into a student's anus...he can't beat that. And what do I see next paragraph? Yep.
I'm telling you education is the same everywhere. Your stories of new books and all that drama is just like ours. The only difference is that we refused to go the Integrated Math route. We had enough veteran teachers in the focus groups that remembered New Math in the 80's and said no way.
So did we. But that's not the answer the district wanted, so....
Sounds familiar. One comment I had was "throw the work on the teacher, they can do it."
In Texas we have mandatory training on choking incidents, how to handle blood pathogens and yes, how to use an Epipen. I've also had students where I've had to be trained for seizures, diabetic reactions and Tourettes behaviors. On top of that we have to deal with meltdowns by autistic students and the various limitations when Special Ed decides to parachute a kid who can't talk, write, or speak into a general education setting. One of my teachers has 25% of her students who are severely disabled. Try that in an art class or 32.
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