'Chaotic' time for school nurses as virus adds to duties
Allegheny-Clarion Valley Elementary School nurse Tracy Dailey's days are a whirlwind of activity.
During working hours, she no longer is just concerned with patching up playground scrapes and checking on children with a cold. Now, she says, almost all of her time is taken up by COVID-19.
School started at Allegheny-Clarion Valley School District on Aug. 25, and the district has moved to remote learning for Tuesday and Wednesday of this week because of an uptick in COVID-19 cases.
“COVID has taken over a lot of things in our world, and school is no exception,” Dailey said. “We're working on COVID for hours of our day, and that takes us away from our screenings and seeing kids in the classrooms.”
Dailey is just one of many nurses at school districts across Butler County juggling increasing COVID-19-related responsibilities with the everyday ins and outs of caring for students.
As students return to class for the 2021-22 school year, some nurses are describing the situation as chaotic.
Nurses at school districts sometimes split their time between multiple school buildings and student populations and take on extra responsibilities on their own time.Mars Area School District has five nurses and two nurse paraprofessionals serving approximately 3,300 students. Moniteau School District has about 1,300 students and two nurses, and Slippery Rock Area School District serves about 1,850 students with three nurses, one of whom works in two buildings.Allegheny-Clarion Valley serves about 600 students with two nurses.“It's just time-consuming,” said Grechen Baysek, a nurse at Mars Area High School. “It has been very, very busy. It's the same craziness as last year, but it is what it is. It's not going away.”Seneca Valley communications director Linda Andreassi said in a statement that the district's nursing departments “are doing an outstanding job of continuing to meet the challenges presented by COVID-19,” but that things have definitely been busy.“We would like to use this time to remind parents to assist our efforts by keeping students home when they are ill, or if they are awaiting the results of a COVID test,” she wrote.
Dailey does all of her own paperwork, and is responsible for the majority of contact tracing in her school, a process that also includes students who hail from all over the region entering the building from the Riverview Intermediate Unit.She said she often stays late after work to catch up on things, and regularly takes her COVID-19 binders home to finish work on her own time.“It's just what I put into it,” she said. “If I don't, I'm just so inundated by the next day. I finished up work yesterday, but this morning I'm already three more cases of COVID in.”Kristi McEwen, school nurse at Moniteau Junior/Senior High School, said that before Moniteau School District closed for a week of remote learning because of increasing COVID-19 cases on Sept. 1, COVID-19-related work and contact tracing was “literally all I did for three days.“I've never been this busy,” she said. “Usually, I have a lot of new student paperwork records and regular office business at the beginning of the school year. I could not do anything beyond contact tracing.“I was getting calls left and right from parents calling in and saying they tested positive, or that their kids went home sick.”Moniteau ran classes remotely for a little less than a week and reopened Tuesday. McEwen said that will give her time to catch up, but that she is still dealing with near-constant contact tracing responsibilities.“I'm almost afraid to answer the phone,” she said. “I spent at least four hours (one recent weekend) contact tracing, and more than that screening calls for the principal and vice principal.”Inputting information for contact tracing, she said, is a laborious process.“We have to put names, addresses, parents' names and phone numbers, and send it to the Department of Health. I had 75 kids this weekend (Aug. 28-29) and there's a lot of demographics to put in.”
Michele Harold, chairman of the nurse department at Butler Area School District and nurse at McQuistion Elementary, said all Butler Area school nurses have taken on more duties since the beginning of the pandemic.Harold said those extra responsibilities include isolating sick students, staying up to date on changes from the state DOH and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, contact tracing, contacting parents to explain quarantine time frames, communicating with the whole school community, documenting case details for all students and all phone calls, supplying students with KN95 masks, running the elementary schools' free thermometer program and notifying Butler County Area Vocational-Technical School and the athletic department of any close contact exposures to COVID.“Prior to COVID-19, Butler Area School District nurses had many responsibilities/state mandates (health screenings, immunizations, etc.) to comply with that went beyond just taking care of sick and injured students,” she wrote in an email. “COVID has added to those responsibilities.”
Joan Timko, nurse at Slippery Rock Area High School and Middle School, said that difficulties haven't been exclusively related to contact tracing: the usual beginning-of-year paperwork has become more complicated as well.At Slippery Rock Area, Thursday was the last day for parents to send their routine required immunization records in to the school before their children would be permitted to attend class.“With everything that was going on last year, that wasn't at the top of (many parents') agendas,” she said. “In trying to still keep kids in school, I spent most of my morning calling parents and doctors' offices, trying to get faxes, so that we can keep kids in school.”Timko is doing all of this work alongside her contact tracing responsibilities,“When I'm doing that contact tracing and I have all of those kids I'm talking to, I'm not seeing the 'I have a headache' kid,” she said. “The 'I have a headache' kid might have to wait for 15 to 20 minutes for me to have room to even have them come down.”COVID-19 makes checking in on students on a daily basis more difficult.At Allegheny-Clarion Valley, Dailey said that teachers have come up with a system: When she does her rounds around the building in the morning and afternoon, teachers will put an apple out on their door to let her know they need her to check in on their room.“We found that has really helped,” she said. “Emergencies we're called out for, but this gives us a little more time on our computers to get things documented.”Dailey had hoped to implement health lessons in classrooms this year, but COVID-19 has made that impossible.“I was so excited because I really wanted to do classroom healthy education, but there's no possible way that's going to happen this year,” she said.
Dailey said that she and other nurses are concerned about getting sick themselves, especially because of a shortage of substitute nurses.“We're trying to limit our contact because there's no one to come in for us,” she said.Dailey said there have been days over the past year when she has questioned whether it is all worth it.“We're not really seeing a light at the end of the tunnel,” she said. “We thought the vaccine was the light at the end of the tunnel, but we're kind of regressing from the vaccination, and asking, is there even a light at the end of the tunnel for kids of elementary age?”She said that overall, work on COVID-19 has been a “tenfold” increase over the work she has done in non-COVID-19 past years.McEwen said that she “isn't burned out yet,” but that this level of work isn't sustainable.“I can't do this every weekend,” she said. “We're hoping this little bit of a break and coming back on Tuesday with masks will help.”She said that administrators at the district have been supportive of how hard nurses are working, but that things are still tough.“My principal came back and thanked me, and said, 'I know it's been rough right now, but we're all in the same boat,'” she said. “They're being very understanding, but I don't know what the solution is.”The advent of a statewide school mask mandate, she said, provides some potential relief.“It's got to cut the spread if everyone's wearing one, I think that will definitely help,” she said. “I wish we would've started out with masks because it would've cut our numbers at least in half.”But not all nurses are convinced.“It's not going to get any better, just period,” Timko said. “In northern Butler County, with the way that mandate is, we have already had notes coming in saying, 'My kid's not wearing a mask,' so I don't think anything is going to change.”Timko said that the only thing she can think of that might make things easier on nurses would be if there were more nurses working at the district, so that they could all devote time to both COVID and everyday concerns.“I think that is probably the biggest thing that nurses feel, is that there's not enough time,” she said.
