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School nurses may have to work on behalf of local health departments when in-person learning resumes

Once in-person schooling resumes in the fall, many nurses may be asked to conduct work for local health departments such as checking temperatures, triage symptoms and possibly contract tracing on students.

For schools reopening in the fall, there is a possibility that school nurses will be assisting local health departments when it comes to detecting the presence of COVID-19 among students.

School nurses are likely to be asked to carefully detect symptoms and make a judgement call on whether they are allergies or if the student should quarantine at home, reports KCUR 89.3.

“So if we have two siblings in a school in different grades and different classrooms, and one has siblings and the other does not, I would allow the other sibling to stay in school,” Angela Myers, a pediatric infectious disease doctor at Children’s Mercy Hospital, said to KCUR. “Obviously continue all the precautions that school is doing with distancing, masking and frequent hand washing.”

Shelby Rebeck, the director of health services for the Shawnee Mission School District, said that she might make a different call, depending on the symptoms.

In the U.S. only about 2% of all coronavirus cases are in children younger than 18, and 94% of them have non-severe disease, according to Children’s Mercy.

These numbers are one of the reasons pediatricians have said that students are better off learning in school than online this fall, reports KCUR.

Reports show that for the majority of schools in the area, about 80% of parents want their kids in school this fall whereas teachers have been more hesitant to return.

Megan Foreman works for the Johnson County Health Department and said at the town hall that if schools take precautions like social distancing, mask wearing and hand washing, the risk to educators is no greater than it is for other adults who’ve gone back to work, reports KCUR.