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Springfield VT School Nurse Illustrates Need for Health Services Early and Often
Decades ago, when I was Superintendent in Exeter NH in the mid-1980s, I questioned the value of having two full time nurses in an elementary school that housed 550 students. That was then, but a recent article in our local newspaper, the Valley News, profiling the school nurse at Springfield HS in Vermont describes the situation now. Valley News writer Nora Burr-Doyle does an excellent job of describing the role of the high school nurse in today’s word, which is far different than the world I grew up in and far different from the world in the mid 1980s:
Being a school nurse is about much more than giving out bandages.
Such has been the experience of Jenny Anderson, a longtime nurse working at Springfield High School who recently was named Vermont’s school nurse of the year. She’s seen the profession evolve plenty in her 28 years on the job.
Anderson and the four other nurses tasked with caring for the district’s 1,500 students do tend to cuts and bruises, but they also increasingly find they are helping students to manage mental health challenges such as anxiety and depression.Anderson’s work also has included developing school nutrition policies and preparing for emergencies.
“To get out of our office and do extra things is difficult sometimes, (but) that’s really important, connecting with teachers and students who don’t come to the office,” Anderson said in a recent interview at Springfield High.
The article describes how a highly functioning school nurse operates, but it also makes two important points: that the public fails to appreciate the need for health series in schools and that by the time a child enters high school it might be too late to help them:
One of the goals of teaching the teachers is to help drive home the connection between academics and health. It’s frustrating, Anderson said, that others in the community sometimes struggle to see that link.
“If kids were more healthy, then they would just be so much better behaviorally (and) do better academically,” she said.
While the high school has health educators, the elementary schools do not, Anderson said. Though many elementary school teachers incorporate elements of health education into their lessons, such as gardening and hygiene, and guidance counselors address subjects related to social and emotional wellness, there is no standardized health education curriculum for the elementary schools, she said.
“I feel like risky behaviors are developed by the time they get to junior high,” she said.
Ms. Burr-Doyle does an excellent job of capturing the role Ms. Anderson plays at Springfield HS, but she also captures the way Springfield HS serves as a hub for social services in the community, especially for children whose parents do not have comprehensive health care provided by their insurance:
To try to improve access, the school district began working with Springfield Medical Care Systems this year to provide doctor’s visits and dental cleanings at the schools, Anderson said. As a result, a doctor comes to one of the district’s schools each week. A dental hygienist visits when the school has five or six students in need of cleanings, Anderson said.
“It’s small right at the moment, but I really feel we’ve helped some kids get the services that they need,” Daniels said.
As states struggle to interject mental health services into their schools, they might look to Springfield, VT to see how it could be done through the school nurse’s office and by collaborating with local health care providers.
Massachusetts Teacher Laments Her Role as Human Shield, Mourns Her Student’s Loss of Innocence
I read with sadness a recent Washington Post op ed by Revere MA teacher Sarah Chaves written in the wake of the report of the Trump administration on how to deal with school shootings. Titled “I’m a Teacher. Don’t Ask Me to Stop a Mass Shooting. I Can’t” with a sub-heading that reads “The Trump administration is standing behind the idea of arming educators. But I don’t want to be a hero”, Ms. Chaves describes the pain she feels because she has no idea how she would respond if a shooter was to enter her school, the sadness that permeates the school whenever they are required to perform a drill of some kind, and the loss her students feel because they have been educated in schools where fear is a constant condition.
But in addition to her feelings of pain and sadness, she also feels a sense of anger and bewilderment because gutless politicians are willing to put courageous teachers on the front lines. She writes:
The (Trump administration’s) report had little to say about gun control. Instead, it urged schools to defend themselves with more guns, echoing statements President Trump has made numerous times since 17 students and staff members were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Armed teachers, not more thoughtful gun laws or comprehensive mental health care, are apparently the answer. We are the ones tasked with stopping a mass murderer.
Instead of hiring more mental health counselors, more “good guys with guns” who cannot possibly man every doorway in every school in America, politicians in both parties have decided that making local decisions about arming teachers is a better path than passing national laws that might make it more difficult for anyone to purchase any weapon they want.
The result? As Ms. Chaves eloquently describes it:
…every day I feel closer to being thought of as armor for stopping a gunman instead of an educator. Every day, each state looks less “red,” less “blue.” Instead, the country has turned a deep shade of purple, an overwhelming bruise of hurt and loss.
And she offers this poignant description of how her attitude towards shootings has changed over the past several years:
After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, a shooting that feels like a lifetime ago because of the number of massacres since then, I held a gathering with my ninth-grade students. They spoke of their sadness, their anger. I spoke with tears in my eyes.
“You know I would do anything I could to protect all of you,” I said.
Anything.
That morning, my students met me with hugs for my selfless words, but with each shooting, with each added ounce of blood that spills, I feel that selflessness waning, feel my fear rising. I have envisioned countless scenarios. I have mapped out escape routes, hiding spots, defensive talking strategies. But in each imagined scene, I don’t get deemed a hero. My picture doesn’t appear on cable news stations across the country. There are no vigils held in my honor. I survive. That’s all.
Teachers across this country have to deal with the sadness and anger their students feel, and reconcile that with their own sense of “waning selflessness”… a sense of selflessness that is exacerbated by the constant drumbeat of the politicians who decry them as being selfish while accepting the blood money of the NRA and echoing that organizations demand for more armed personnel in every nook and cranny of our country.
Here’s hoping that 2019 will bring about a change in our thinking about guns in school and guns in our country.
The Conversation We SHOULD Have About Schools vs. the Conversation We ARE Having
Medium contributor Arthur Chiaravalli’s recent article, “We’re Having the Wrong Conversation about the Future of Schools” crosswalks many of the points made by Anand Giridharadas in Winners Take All into public education. Like Giridharadas, Mr. Chiaravalli notes the subtle ways the tech plutocrats and testing industry have changed the conversations we are having about public policy in a way that undercuts the structural problems of our economy that are the result of the status quo.
And like Mr. Giridharadas, Mr. Chiaravalli sees the so-called “agents of change” as champions of the status quo, a status quo that rewards “entrepreneurs” and marginalizes or penalizes those who raise questions about the status quo.
After laying out his case that we are having the wrong conversation about public education, Mr. Chiaravalli concludes his post with this:
…reformers peddle the so-called empty doctrines of individualism, personalization, objectivity, entrepreneurialism, and meritocracy—all while exacerbating inequities and deprofessionalizing teachers.
….The primary effect is always to atomize: content into itemized bits, classrooms into individualized projects and timelines, and each of us into solitary individuals pursuing personalized pathways.
Among the many omissions implicit in (the reformer’s) vision is the notion that each student has equal access to a pathway of choice. Once that false premise is established, you are truly on your own.Pull yourself up by the bootstraps, find your own personal road less traveled, dive headfirst into the entrepreneurial shark tank. Unfortunately, far too many smaller-scale reform movements espouse a similar ethos, often flooding Twitter with a toxic positivity that ignores intransigent inequities and injustices.
The reformers who want to isolate us from each other, who promote the idea that since one individual overcomes poverty thanks to grit means that every individual born into poverty can do so, who see the purpose of education as improving the economic growth of our country are leading us down the wrong path and causing us to engage in the wrong conversation about the future. In fact, they are envisioning a future that is based on the premise that what worked for them in the past is what should work for everyone else going forward. That is not reform… it is reinforcement.
Vote even if you think it doesn’t matter…. and be grateful you still can!
Network Schools - Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for 