Philadelphia School Nursing Crisis is Focus of Sick Days

 
Philadelphia, PA – A new multimedia documentary Sick Days: The Philadelphia School Nurse Shortage explores the impact of budget cuts on Philadelphia public schools, focusing on school nurses. [Sample photographs at bottom of release]
Concentrating on this one component of the school budget crisis has allowed for more attention to detail, facilitating not only a deeper understanding of the immediate effects of the school nurse shortage, but also how it is connected to the larger (and often harder to detect) issue of structural violence.
“I really feel like children and young people are canaries in the mine of society,” says Kitty Watts, a school nurse at Finletter Elementary.  “School nurses can see the whole picture of the population and what’s going on.  How many more kids have asthma now? How many more kids are autistic now? How much violence there is…. These are all indicators that our children are showing us of how toxic our society is, how toxic our culture is.  And we really need to look and see this.  I feel like as a nurse I’m putting gas masks on the canaries in the mine.  If we don’t really look at the whole society and the whole picture and what is really the foundation of how we’re thinking and planning and financing and teaching,  it’s just going to get worse.  What’s more important than health and education?”
“It’s disgraceful,” says Eileen DiFranco, Roxborough High School  “This year we’re down three counselors, a vice principal, a dean, and seven teachers.  So what has happened is the dean and I and the principal are the ones who do pickup care for psych emergencies.  The safety net is becoming holier and holier and our kids are being exposed to more and more danger.  I don’t understand how you don’t take care of children.  Children are our most valuable resource and not caring for them says something about us as a society.  Also the food stamp cutbacks just went into effect so it will be interesting to see how that plays out.”
Over the course of four months at the start of the 2013-2014 school year, photographer Katrina Ohstrom worked around city bureaucrats to gain access to seventeen different schools. The documentary project consists of video interviews and portraits of the nurses who are serving on the front lines of the city’s public education crisis, as well as haunting full-