Hello, Everyone! As all of the holiday food and libation, family gatherings and travel fade away… we would like to wish you all a very Happy 2010! As we jump right into the second half of our school year, we wanted to address a serious concern – our school nurses. Every newsletter we try and include an article from our Stevenson school nurse. The problem is recently she has been stretched so thin she hasn’t had time to write anything for us. So we decided to interview Sjaan Buck, Head Nurse for all of the Burbank Schools and see if we could get some insight into this situation.

Mrs. Buck has 38 years experience in children’s health here in BUSD. She is also Head Nurse at Burroughs High School where she sees about 100 students a day for some kind of health need. “We have a tradition here in Burbank – we advocate for children’s health”, Mrs. Buck began. “But I think parents need to know – right now the level of care needs to be much better. There are only 7 licensed nurses for all of our 18 Burbank school sites. Burroughs High School alone has 2800 students and I am the only nurse on site. How can this few nurses possibly serve all of the students’ needs?” We asked her to give us some perspective – how many school nurses did there used to be here? “Well, in 1972 there were 14 full time nurses and, remember, fewer students.”

Currently our school nurses work 10 to 12 hours every day providing health services, but also tending to all of the paper work that goes along with it. Mrs. Buck said, “The Nurses are very stressed and over-worked and extremely concerned that there might even be more cuts to the number of school nurses.” (Mrs. Buck will be retiring sometime soon and believes that BUSD will not replace her – allowing the number of school nurses to drop to 6.) “On top of that”, she continued, “We are very concerned about the stress affecting our ability to adequately perform our jobs. Stress is a key factor in how well our school nurses can perform their services.”

“California’s State Budget is a mess. And when they (legislators) cut programs or cut funds, they always say they are cutting ‘the furthest from the children’. Cutting nurses and the services they provide our children is cutting about as CLOSE to our children as you can cut! How can we possibly serve all the students needs? There are 45 diabetic children in BUSD who have to have their insulin shots administered by a licensed nurse. There is the importance of screening students before readmitting them to school after a contagious illness. The list goes on and the nurses are few.”

We wanted to know what solution she might suggest. “Well, PTA has always been our biggest champion. Please inform your PTA that we would need 9 – 10 nurses (11 would be perfect) to even allow one nurse just two days a week at all school sights.”

Everybody involved in public education has been feeling the budget cuts for quite some time. And as Mrs. Buck suggested, this directly affects their job performance – a huge concern when it comes to health services for our kids. As leaders of our PTA, we wanted you to know the facts. Yes, our school board does make the decisions re: money, replacements / new hires, etc. But our state education budget is where that money is coming from. And when that budget keeps shrinking, everybody feels the squeeze – especially our children.

Stay involved, make a change!

Felix Chamberlain
Tiffany Bakas
The PTA Tag Team