"I did school nursing for 8 years, and I loved it. I’d go back in a heartbeat but the caseloads are ridiculous. The national recommendation is 1 nurse to 750 healthy kids, so not including the diabetics and asthmatics, etc. I had 1 to 1600 kids just to myself. I was also mentoring or training two or three nurses at a time, so I was the backup nurse to their clinics. Let’s say your kid goes to a school that’s not a regional site, and your kid gets diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Your child can’t return to their home school unless you, as a parent, agree to provide all the diabetic care. They will transfer them, bus them to a regional site. There are 10 regional sites in Tacoma Public Schools but there are 32 elementary schools, so you just have to hope that if you are diagnosed with diabetes you don’t go to one of the 66% of schools. It’s horrible. We’ve been advocating for at least an LPN in every building, then the RN’s could float around, but that pushed it. And now during COVID… My dream is to open an “Oakland Clinic” in every high school in Tacoma, and I want to be on the Multicare side as the nurse-lead of the school-based clinics. I want the clinics to be able to see not only the kids but their families. I think it would be an awesome resource, right in the communities. The only reason Oakland happened was because one of the school nurses at the time was in her ARNP program. She had to pick a capstone, so she said, ‘I’ll open a clinic at Oakland.’ So she pushed for it and Oakland came to be. If we put one out in Mt. Tahoma which has 2000 children, plus you’d have three middle school feeder schools… Multicare could provide care to a lot of kids."

 

Alex Stillman, RN