[Aaron C.]

Paging the School Nurse

Paging the School Nurse!'

School nurses in St. Louis, Missouri, juggle some very complex duties. Finally, their work is being recognized—in the form of better pay.

If you think school nursing is all about flu shots, Band-Aids, and record-keeping, you haven't made an appointment with St. Louis nurses Susan Davis, Marve Stewart, and Janet Utley. A school health professional in this urban district, they say, is a mentor, role model, "risk manager," and operator of a full-service health clinic—for students and adult staff alike.
The daily workload of a St. Louis nurse can involve everything from home accidents and chronic diseases to tube-feeding and the fallout of social problems. On top of daily injuries, "we see kids dealing with stress at an early age, kids whose parents are incarcerated, chemically dependent, or shot," says Utley, a nurse at Mullanphy Elementary. Indeed, an "amazing" number of students have lost parents, she laments, "and I see a number coming to school tired because they just don't go to bed on time....I'll deal with aches and pains and just can't find a significant cause."
Stewart, a nurse at Metro High School, notes the increasingly high number of students in her district with asthma.
"There are a lot of sick kids here," she says. And that, says Susan Davis, who works at Oak Hill Elementary, requires a lot of parent outreach—and not simply to ensure students are being given regular medication properly. "If kids are hurt at school," she says, "parent perception of the treatment we give is just as important as the outcome."
So what's all this expertise worth in pay? If you consider, says Missouri NEA's (MNEA) Graylon Brown, that nurses are "just like social workers," and that their "medical decision supercedes that of the administrator—right down to the decision to call emergency services," you'd think, well, a lot.
But before nurse members of NEA-St. Louis negotiated a new written agreement last year, the district offered a lowly nursing pay scale of $23,431–$33,380.
The inevitable pricetag: 13 vacancies for 89 registered nurse (RN) positions and some very dedicated, but very frustrated health care professionals.
But school nurses are educators, too, and with MNEA guidance, St. Louis RNs elected a nine-member bargaining team, which carefully briefed district negotiators about comparable nursing salaries elsewhere in the metro region and the complexity of modern-day school nursing.
The data and personal stories worked. The nurses held strong and negotiated a substantial salary increase, retroactive to July 1, 2004, that boosted the pay scale to $32,306– $50,358. And they gained both treatment as "certified" staff and extra pay for nursing team leaders, up to $2,320 a year.
The moral of the story, say the nurses: Stay united, make sure your district understands your work, show respect for "teachers and kids alike," and keep loving what you do. It'll all pay off.
—Dave Winans