ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, May 23, 1996 TAG: 9605230026
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-16 EDITION: METRO
IT'S THIS simple: A public-school teacher has no business giving students insulin injections and stomach-tube feedings or performing tracheal suctioning and catheterizations.
Parents of children who need such medical treatments during the school day should be outraged that some school superintendents in Virginia have required teachers to provide these medical services as a cost-saving substitute for hiring school nurses.
And they're not the only ones who should be outraged. All Virginians ought to be. The preventive-health value of having a trained nurse on hand, who can spot illnesses or other problems early, is lost to countless children. And teachers who must double as nurses can't give 100 percent of their time and effort to the job of teaching. This practice, reportedly fairly common in the state, cheats schoolchildren of both their medical-care and educational due.
It's also potentially dangerous. Even if teachers have received some training in simple medical procedures, they're not qualified to deal with complications that may result. Medically fragile children could be hurt or made ill; teachers could be sued.
Regarding this possibility, an official with Mecklenburg County public schools defended their practices the other day by noting that the county's School Board has a $2 million liability policy covering school employees accused of negligence in providing medical services. Does that comfort parents of children who might be injured, or teachers who might have to live with the knowledge that they had caused such injury?
It was a Mecklenburg case that recently spotlighted anew school divisions' scrimping on school-based health services. A couple objected when school officials wanted teachers to give insulin shots to their 6-year-old son, diagnosed with juvenile diabetes mellitus. An administrative-hearing officer ruled that teachers could give the injections; the child's parents have appealed the ruling.
Whatever its outcome, this case highlights' many school administrators' obtuseness. Most teachers aren't providing anything like the procedures mentioned above. But, like it or not, schools have a growing responsibility to meet children's health-care needs - needs that too often are neglected because of families' lack of financial means or health-care insurance or for other reasons. Yet schools continue to have a chronic shortage of nurses. Several school systems in Virginia have none; others have far too few.
Roanoke city is one that, to its credit, has beefed up its school-nurse complement in recent years. City schools now have 19 registered nurses, for a ratio of one nurse to every 690 students, not including nurses who man health-care centers on two campuses.
Several years ago, the General Assembly decreed that the Virginia standard should be one school nurse for every 1,000 schoolchildren. But it failed to mandate that standard. And, while the state now provides about $13 million a year for school-based health services, the legislature also does not mandate that this money be used for health care. The upshot is that local school officials can divert these state dollars for other purposes, and many do.
However worthwhile those other purposes, it's high time the state and localities recognized that school nurses are not frills, but a necessity. Making teachers sub as nurses is akin to organized malpractice.
LENGTH: Medium: 63 linesby CNB