The Motherlode blog from The New York Times is exploring the costs and benefits of school nurses, riffing off a troubling Parenting.com article about the possible consequences of nursing cutbacks.
Curious how this could play out here in San Diego? Check out our article about the endangered school nurse in San Diego schools, which notes:
Forced to figure out how to gut their own budgets to close an estimated $120 million deficit, principals across San Diego Unified planned to slash half of the nurses who are stationed at their schools and a fourth of the health technicians, who care for students but don’t have nursing degrees. Doing so would save roughly $3.8 million.
San Diego Unified tentatively plans to expand an existing pool of traveling nurses to cover more schools, but nobody is exactly sure how often those nurses will be able to stop by. More than 40 out of roughly 140 nurses in the school district could be warned this week that their jobs are on the line.
Please contact Emily Alpert directly at emily.alpert@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.550.5665 and follow her on Twitter: twitter.com/emilyschoolsyou.