Lynn school nurses stepping up to face greater health challenges

LYNN – Monday mornings can be pretty busy in a school nurse’s office.Odds are good that over any given weekend, some of the 13,700 kids in Lynn schools will get sick. And odds are even better that some of the families of those kids either don’t have health insurance, or if they do, they might not know where to bring a 6 year old with an ear ache on a Saturday night.So parents sometimes tell their kids they need to wait. And when Monday morning rolls around, instead of keeping them home because they’re sick, they send them to school – because they’re sick.For some kids, school is the only place they are sure to get any medical attention and school nurses are the only health-care providers they know.”A generation ago, school nurses came in and looked at the records and the school secretary did the first aid,” said Katherine McNulty, the district’s school nurse leader.Today, school nurses are caring for kids with profound physical handicaps, chronic illnesses and mental health issues. And with the help of partners like the Lynn Community Health Center, which has launched clinics in six schools, McNulty and the team of 28 Lynn school nurses have created their own small health-care system for Lynn kids.McNulty said one of the biggest changes in school nursing came with special education, or Chapter 766, the 1973 law that kicked open the doors of locals school to make way for kids with special needs no matter how severe. Lynn has two “Together Educating and Advancing Multiply Handicapped Students”(TEAMS) programs. Children with multiple handicaps attend Ingalls Elementary School through the eighth grade and then transfer over to Lynn Tech.Mary Smith is a school nurse who has been working with profoundly handicapped kids for 15 years.Smith likes to joke that she once figured school nurses stuck to scraped knees and Band-Aids, but as it turns out, they care for kids with ventilators, feeding tubes and tracheotomies. For Smith, it’s all part of her job.In addition to caring for students with special needs, McNulty said school nurses have been meeting the challenges of other health trends. Asthma is rampant, sudden seizures are increasing and nurses are keeping an eye on 120 cases of allergies, mostly to different types of food.But what’s really raising eyebrows among the school nurses is the 35-case spike of childhood diabetes among students.”Who monitors their blood sugar? Who teaches them about diet?” asks McNulty, who shrugs and then answers her own question. “The school nurse.”As kids grow older, McNulty said there’s a steep increase in the need for psychiatric care and a lot of kids turn to their school nurse for help.”They come because it’s safe and they know I’m not going to discipline or rate them,” said McNulty. “It’s a very trusting relationship and it’s often in those visits that kids might reveal something like they’re pregnant or deeply depressed.”Deb Capano, or Nurse Deb, who took care of the children at Brickett School for 13 years before moving over to Harrington, agreed that a lot of high school kids are able to talk to school nurses about things they would not share with parents.”They can come and tell me that had sex last night and ask for a morning-after pill,” said Capano.She said one thing school nurses cannot do is judge either students or their parents.”If you’re going to be judgmental, you’re in the wrong city,” she said. “Being judgmental actually hinders health care.”