South San Francisco, CA March 29, 2015 Submitted by Mike Glines
Do parents or community members in South San Francisco know how many Nurses and Health Technicians the school district has for 9200 students and 17 sites? Do you know how many hours they have at each school per week?
Answer:
One Registered Nurse
3 Health Service Technicians.
The Nurse covers the entire district, thus she is a district nurse and not a school nurse .
There are 3 Health Service Technicians who each cover 5 sites per week. They are allowed 5.75 hours of work time per week at those sites! One site one day per week.
The High Schools alone have almost 3000 students.
They need your help to let the District know we need more Health staff.
4 years ago the District tried to cut all Technicians out ,by saying the secretaries could do the job and stating “We know some things will get overlooked”!
What would get overlooked would be the health needs of our students during the school day.
More help is needed. More staff is needed, more hours for existing staff is needed. Let the Board and officials know this.
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School Board meetings are held the 2nd and 4th Thursdays of the month at 7pm at the Baden School Gym. Agendas and minutes can be found HERE. Once a quarter the meetings are televised on the community channels which are also archived and can be found at the link above.
To contact your board members:
Judy Bush [email protected]
Patrick Lucy [email protected]
Maurice Goodman [email protected]
Rosa Acosta [email protected]
Rick Ochsenhirt [email protected]
What exactly does the nurse and the health technicians do? I’m not saying we don’t need more, I’m just not sure what they do, so I wouldn’t be able to ask for more. Thanks:-)
Pat,
I just saw your reply I will send you some information in the near future then you can see what it is we actually do
Thanks
Pat, The Health Services Technicians do a lot. There is so many areas we touch on, its hard to tell it all in this reply. I’ll try>
1- We are responsible for all of the health records for over 9100 students in our District.
2- We must insure that all students meet State requirements for immunizations prior to enrollment and follow up on all students who will need additional shots in the future.
3- We must collect health information from parents and insure that if medication is needed, all proper forms and medication is turned into the school before the student can use that medicine at school.
4- We must insure that all students entering K and ! must have current physical examinations on file prior to entry.
5- We prepare and constantly update a medical concerns list, that alerts staff to the medical need and concerns of students. In some schools alone, this list can include over 300 students.
6- The Nurse is responsible for all direct medical care when it comes to such needs as diabetes. She must travel to various sites daily to oversee care. She also along with one On Call Nurse screen over 3500 students a year for vision and hearing, mandated by the State.
7- We must constantly check when students enroll through out the year for all requirements.
We get 5.75 per day at each site, one site one day. When we assist the Nurse with logistics of screening for vision and hearing, that’s time away from a site that can not be recovered.
Example of work load, one Technician has almost 4000 students in their sites, 2 High Schools, One Middle School, one Elementary and the pre school at Children’s Center. Each High School shares one half of a day extra every other week.
If you’d need more info please let me know my email is [email protected]
Thanks for asking questions.