Lack of school nurses puts Los Angeles students at risk, striking teachers say
Los Angeles teacher Natali Escobedo says she will never forget the image of a diabetic fourth-grader “wilting” at her school because there was no nurse on hand to administer his insulin.
The episode, which followed years of tight budgets that left little money for medical staff, highlights the potential impact of a lack of nurses throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the key reasons Escobedo and her colleagues are on strike.
In L.A., as in many districts across the United States, the school nurse is the first and sometimes only point of entry for many families into a complicated and expensive health-care system.
Like most schools in the more than 1,200-campus district, Lockwood Elementary, where Escobedo teaches, has a nurse just once a week. Children who become ill are left to the care of first-aid trained administrators or simply wait for a nurse to come from a nearby school to help them.
“There were times when the student would be struggling because of his condition,” Escobedo said. “He would have to wait or the nurse would get sidetracked due to some other emergency and my student had to sit in the office like a wilting flower waiting for his medicine to arrive.”
Teachers in the massive district, which serves more than 600,000 students, have been on strike since Jan. 14.
In an unusual twist for a labor negotiation, the two sides are fairly close on salary, but teachers say they are holding out for an improvement in student conditions, citing the need for more school nurses, psychologists and smaller class sizes in a district where as many as 46 students are sometimes crammed in a single classroom.
The teachers are demanding a full-time nurse at every school in the district, compared CONTINUE READING: Lack of school nurses puts Los Angeles students at risk, striking teachers say