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CORTLANDT, N.Y. No fanfare will likely accompany National School Nurse Day, but school nurses around Cortlandt say its not official days of appreciation that keep them going, its the daily thanks from students.
Having the kids thank me for helping them, or listening, because they know they can come in here and tell me anything, are Kathy Frosts favorite part of being a school nurse at Hendrick Hudson High School, she says. Im their other mother sometimes.
More than 76,000 school nurses work in the U.S. School nurses have one priority the health and well-being of students. Healthy children learn better is a simple truth, and school nurses help to remove barriers to academic success, wrote the National Association of School Nurses.
All school nurses in New York State are registered nurses. On a daily basis, most work closely with athletic departments, social workers and psychologists and are often the first stop for students with physical or psychological problems.
The work school nurses do is so much more than Band-Aids, Frost says.
Im like the on-call do everything. 'Do you have a needle and thread?' 'Can you fix my glasses?' 'Do you have a hairdryer?' People think I have everything, says Frost.
Phyllis Cobb, the school nurse at Croton-Harmon High School, says as times have changed after the financial crisis of 2008 she has become more relied upon by students whose health insurance coverage has changed.
Helping kids reduce their stress level, helping a kid whos having an anxiety attack for the first time, some of what I do is psychology, not just nursing, says Cobb. My goal with a lot of these kids is to make them really self-sufficient and independent so that theyre ready, theyre really ready to take care of themselves, says Cobb.
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