Somerville school nurses out of money
This flu season, Somerville’s school nurses will have to cope with not only sick kids but reduced funding: As of Nov. 9, the city’s $87,000 share of the state’s Enhanced School Health Services grant was cut in half.
City health director Paulette Renault-Caragianes said the grant covered the school system’s clinical nurse leader and helped with everything from substitute nurses and advanced training to educational handouts and hand sanitizer. The system’s already spent more than 50 percent of its original allotment, so "We have no money going forward," she said, "at a time when school nurses’ roles have extended far, far beyond" the old norms.
Renault-Caragianes emphasized that the district’s dozen-plus school nurses deal not only with "Band-Aids and bruises and bumps" but tube-feeding children with special health care needs and mandatory monitoring for fitness standards and H1N1 outbreaks.
They are, in fact, at the center of containing the H1N1 pandemic, she said. Any child with flu symptoms must be isolated until they can get taken home; for every student who calls in sick, a nurse has to contact the family right away to find out if the student might have H1N1.
Renault-Caragianes is checking the city budget for reinforcement, she said, but "There are so many competing interests" for those funds.
Waiting for Twitter to feed in the latest...