School nurses, a mainstay in past generations, have become a luxury despite growing needs for care.
Consider: Salt Lake City School District has three nurses in charge of 25,000 students. Granite School District has 10 nurses for 71,000 students; Jordan School District has six attending to 73,000 students, or one nurse to about 12,500 students.State law recommends one nurse to 5,000 students; the nationally recommended ratio is 1-750.
"If we had our druthers, we'd have one school nurse in every school," said Nancy Woodward, director of student and family services for the Salt Lake City School District. "It's a matter of dollars."
A lack of state funds gets the blame for the relatively few school nurses, honored Wednesday as part of Utah's School Nurse Day.
A 1996 law allowed for state funds to pay one-third of the cost for the caretakers if districts provide the rest, said Rep. Nora Stephens, R-Sunset, a champion for school nurses to take burdens of medicating students off teachers.
That law brought two nurses to Davis School District. The district in all has 14 nurses, one supervisor, and four aides who contract through the Davis County Health Department, said Margaret Snow, nursing director for the health department. Its nurse-student ratio is around 1-6,000.
The state currently allots about $400,000 for school nurses under the State Office of Education Budget, according to a state fiscal analyst's report; the analyst recommends funding increase by $100,000. Each district now has at least one school nurse.
"There has been a big, big increase," Stephens said. "The bill has been successful."
While Stephens intended funding for nurses to be phased in, she says $7 million in state funds alone is needed to bring the nurse-student ratio to the national par. Districts provide the other two-thirds of the money in matching funds.
School nurses' duties have expanded from bandaging scrapes to training teachers and staff to administer medication and creating health plans for students with ongoing needs due to spina bifida, diabetes or seizure disorders, for example. Some also teach maturation programs.
"There are not enough nurses physically to be on the premises, so we rely on office staff to give medications and be the Band-Aid brigade," said Kristine Baker, whose 15-school territory covers south Sandy in the Jordan District. Baker works out of Jordan High but travels to schools often and answers questions via telephone.
"We have a lot of kids in school now who used to be in a special environment and they're being mainstreamed."
School nurses also may be a child's only health-care professional, Stephens said. They also could help stave off liability problems pinpointed in a Texas lawsuit over a child who became disabled following a medical emergency at a school that had no nurse, she said.
"We're very vulnerable to that kind of lawsuit in the state of Utah," Stephens said.