Asthma Shouldn't Kill – Every School Needs a Nurse | National Opportunity to Learn Campaign | Education Reform for Equity and Opportunity

Asthma Shouldn't Kill – Every School Needs a Nurse | National Opportunity to Learn Campaign | Education Reform for Equity and Opportunity:

Asthma Shouldn't Kill – Every School Needs a Nurse

Posted on: Wednesday October 16th, 2013

By John Jackson, President & CEO of the Schott Foundation, and Susan Gobreski, Executive Director of EdVoters PA

Tell State and Federal Leaders:
Every School Needs
a Full-Time Nurse

Click here to sign the petition!

Each day, parents across the country send their children to school with the expectation that they will be safe and cared for while they learn.

On September 25th, the father of Laporshia Massey, a sixth-grader at Bryant Elementary School in Philadelphia, learned the tragic extent to which his daughter’s school was not equipped to support her: Laporshia died after having an asthma attack at school.

Due to budget cuts, there was no school nurse on duty that day. Instead, her teacher told her to stay calm, and a staff member drove her home after school. Her father immediately recognized how serious her symptoms were and rushed her to the emergency room. Laporshia collapsed on the way there and passed away at the hospital.

Laporshia’s family believes that having a nurse on site that day might very well have saved her life. Trained to recognize when a student is in need of emergency care and to provide it, a health professional is a critical resource that no school should be without.

It’s no surprise then that in the wake of Philadelphia’s school funding crisis, this story took three weeksto break. Laporshia’s death is