School Nurses Fear a Coronavirus Surge as Students and Staff Return From Winter Break – By Katie Reilly (TIME) / January 4 2021
On a Sunday in December, during what should have been her day off, Sherri Groenland was working the phones, trying to track down everyone who had come in contact with the latest COVID-19 case in South Carolina’s Charleston County School District. That meant pulling school bus schedules and classroom seating charts, asking kids to remember who they had been with, for how long and whether they’d been wearing masks.
“Were they in the right seat? And was there distance between them? Was there not?” says Groenland, a nurse at Wando High School in Mt. Pleasant, S.C. “Did they go to after-school care? Do they participate in after-school activities? Who have they been around?”
“It turned into several hours of trying to find people to tell them not to come to school,” she says. The next morning, Groenland made 25 phone calls before 11 a.m. “And that’s not including the stack on my desk right now that I have to call.”
For school nurses like Groenland, the pandemic has upended their routines and expanded their responsibilities, taking them from mending playground injuries and administering medications and throwing them onto the frontlines of the effort to prevent COVID-19’s spread within schools.
“This isn’t about ice packs and Band-Aids. It’s so much more.”
CONTINUE > https://time.com/5926043/school-nurses-coronavirus/
