Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, May 19, 1995                   TAG: 9505190056
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE SCHOOL-NURSE SHORTFALL

Not all of the students, thankfully, get stomach aches, cut knees or the sniffles every school day. But imagine what King's job would be like if even 1 percent of the students - 89 kids spread around the county in 20 separate locations - suffered ailments or injuries that required the nurse's attention during a single day.

Hey, it can happen. On Tuesday of this week - in one hour, at one elementary school - King dealt with eight children who'd had accidents (a possible fractured arm, a tooth knocked loose, etc.) plus numerous other children due to receive inoculations. For King's sake and the children's, Montgomery County residents should be grateful that several pre-med students at Virginia Tech have volunteered to help at one school - Harding Avenue Elementary.

Residents also should be (1) outraged that their county has allowed this situation to develop, and (2) insistent that the nursing shortfall be corrected - soon.

The Tech students have organized, sought and received special training - in first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), for instance, and are hoping to branch out into at least two other county schools next year. That's fine. They've found a way to gain some first-hand experience while providing a useful community service.

That in no way lets the county off the hook for shirking its responsibility to put more nurses in schools to meet children's increasing health-care needs. Indeed, the county was among jurisdictions taken to task when the Virginia Association of School Nurses found it had only one nurse serving 8,500 students in 1992. Since then, it's expanded facilities and hired additional teachers for its growing school population, but still thinks it can make do with one nurse.

This negligence is, of course, not exclusively the county's. Some years ago, the General Assembly determined that the standard should be one school nurse for every 1,000 schoolchildren. But the legislature neither mandated nor fully funded the standard. In fact, lawmakers have done little to ensure that state funds provided for school-health programs aren't diverted by local governments for other purposes.

Even so, the county must be faulted for its moral obtuseness. In Montgomery, just as in more urban jurisdictions, schools open their doors daily to chronically ill students and students who for a variety of reasons have insufficient access to primary and preventive care.

Montgomery is teaching at-risk kids who may not see a doctor even once a year because their families lack the money. Health affects learning - and, for many youngsters, the only source of health care is at school. School nurses may be the only health-care professionals who see, in time to do something about it, children made sick from malnutrition, poor sanitation, drugs, alcohol - or abuse.

School nurses can even save lives. But only if they see children - and more often and more routinely than one nurse can see 8,900 kids. Tech pre-med students may help with head lice and scraped elbows, and their voluntarism is commendable. But they are not even a cheap substitute for school nurses. They are no substitute.