Philly Student Dies With No Nurse on Duty. Organizers Call for Officials to Resign | National Opportunity to Learn Campaign | Education Reform for Equity and Opportunity

Philly Student Dies With No Nurse on Duty. Organizers Call for Officials to Resign | National Opportunity to Learn Campaign | Education Reform for Equity and Opportunity:

Philly Student Dies With No Nurse on Duty. Organizers Call for Officials to Resign

Posted on: Friday May 23rd, 2014

Jackson Elementary parents give statement to
the press. Photo via Philly.com

For the second time this school year, a Philadelphiastudent died after falling ill at school. Due to budget cuts, neither school had a full-time nurse on duty to provide appropriate medical attention to the students. Now, organizers in Philadelphia are calling for the resignation of city officials unless they can provide the full school funding necessary to put a nurse in every school. 

On Wednesday, May 21, a 7-year-old student at Jackson Elementary in South Philadelphia died. The school only has a nurse on site on Thursdays and every other Friday.

While it's unclear if having a nurse on site that day might have made the crucial difference, too many schools are similarly doing without full-time medical professionals and the situation is endangering students across the city: Last September, 6th-grader Laporshia Massey died from complications of an asthmas attack at school. Again, there was no school nurse on duty to assess the seriousness of her symptoms and get her the medical attention she needed. 

In a column for The Notebook, Helen Gym of Parents United for Public Education urged city Superintendent William Hite and the School Reform Commission to "take a stand now – or resign."

We are not engaged in the practice of education anymore. We are engaging in a sick social experiment where we strip every imaginable resource from young children and adults, then sit back and watch what happens. We blame young adults at Bartram when chaos erupts, we mull ridiculous questions about whether nurses matter in a life or death situation. But we don’t fundamentally question the structure District leadership and the SRC have designed, endorsed, and sold [...]

It's time for "accountability" from those who so often demand it from others. The true powers behind them – the governor, the mayor and City Council – have delayed, bickered, blustered, 

Philly Student Dies With No Nurse on Duty. Organizers Call for Officials to Resign | National Opportunity to Learn Campaign | Education Reform for Equity and Opportunity: