A Time Bomb Waiting To Blow

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.