Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 2, 1994 TAG: 9402250004
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That is an outrage.
It is also a prime example of how children's health is caught up in Virginia's failure to address disparities in school funding. Some school divisions - Virginia Beach, for example - have a registered nurse in every school.
As with school inequities generally, it would be inaccurate to cast blame only on big, bad state government. Just as some jurisdictions have shirked their responsibility to put fair-share local revenues into schools, so have some held back on school-health programs.
And just as some counties a couple of years ago took their shares of an extra $57 million the state allocated for anti-disparity initiatives and spent them on firefighting equipment and the like, so it also appears that some school divisions may be using state funds intended for school-health programs for other purposes. One Central Virginia county, for instance, gets state aid based on its claimed yearly provision of more than 8,000 "nurse hours." Yet, as of 1992, the county employed no nurses for its 10,000-plus public-school students.
Such dubious local practices aside, it's still fair to say that the state's commitment to school-based health programs has been grossly inadequate.
The General Assembly has determined that the standard in Virginia should be one school nurse for every 1,000 students. But in its moral obtuseness, it has not provided the funds to ensure the standard is met. As a result, many divisions don't come close.
According to a 1992 survey by the Virginia Association of School Nurses, a total of 27 school divisions - including Botetourt and some others in Southwest Virginia - have no school nurses. Several others have no registered nurses, only licensed practical nurses who aren't trained to perform many medical duties routinely required in schools these days.
Almost all are understaffed. Roanoke County, for instance, has one registered nurse and one assistant to serve 13,000 schoolchildren. Montgomery County in 1992 had one RN for 8,500 students; Henry County had one for 9,800. A far cry from the one for every 1,000 that the legislature says is desirable.
Desirable and, under current circumstances, increasingly necessary.
Among the current circumstances is a trend toward mainstreaming - that is, integrating emotionally and physically disabled students into regular classes, as opposed to "special education" classes. Also, public schools are opening their doors each morning to chronically ill students: children who are sick from drafty houses, poor sanitation, unbalanced diets. Sick, too, from abuse of drugs or alcohol. Or from abuse by their parents. Meantime, many children are never seen by primary-care physicians because their families can't afford it.
Not the schools' problem, some will say. These are educational facilities, not health departments.
But it is a school's problem if children's health problems impair their ability to learn. And it is a problem the state has got to address - by increasing funding and enforcing mandates either to hire more school nurses, or to pay for more public-health-department nurses to serve the schools.
Legislation that Del. Linda Puller, D-Mount Vernon, plans to introduce may be a starting place. As we understand it, it wouldn't mandate big, new expenditures in 1994, but it would set the state on a course toward meeting its school-nurse standard within four years.
It also would ensure that about $11 million, already included in Gov. Wilder's proposed budget for the next two years, is actually used by local school divisions to hire school nurses or to contract for public-health nurses to visit the schools. No more diverting funds to pay bus drivers while limiting health care to head-lice checks conducted twice a year by PTA volunteers.
The legislature really would do well to find the money next year to meet its own standard: one school nurse for f+ieveryo 1,000 students, regardless of where the students live. Given other demands to deal with other public-education inequities, passing Puller's bill may be the best lawmakers can do in 1994.
It's certainly the least they can do.
Keywords:
GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1994
by CNB