Framingham — A report last year by the National Education Association found that fewer than 40 percent of public schools nationwide employ full-time nurses.
Aurelia Medina, district nurse lead for Framingham Public Schools, said while Framingham is adequately staffed for the current school year that is soon to end, the district has periodically had challenges hiring nurses since the pandemic, and nurses often feel burned out and isolated.
“Right now we’re fully staffed, which is great, but it’s getting harder to find staff who want to work in the school system,” Medina said in a recent interview.
She said there is a lot of burnout among school clinicians and people are feeling physically and mentally exhausted.
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“In terms of nursing, we’ve been burned out for so long, and our nurses just don’t want to do it anymore, and that’s trickling down to the schools,” Medina said. “We faced this issue last year, we didn’t have enough staffing, and we had a really hard time finding staff.”
Experts say staffing issues have increased since the pandemic
Judy Steyer, a member of the Framingham Board of Education and a former school nurse who served as health and wellness director for Framingham Public Schools for 15 years, said staffing shortages have been an issue for years but have gotten worse since the pandemic.
“The school nurse shortage was starting before the pandemic, but it’s definitely been exacerbated by the pandemic,” said Steyer, who retired in 2022 and now works as a consultant for the state. “Nurses have been working themselves to the bone throughout the pandemic, and they’re burned out and exhausted.”
She added that like other workforce issues around the country, school nursing typically attracts older, specialist nurses with experience working in hospitals who are looking for something different.
“Typically the workers were older, they were at retirement age or nearing retirement age, so they had enough and said, ‘I’m done,'” Steyer said.
School health experts interviewed for this article said increased student anxiety since the pandemic has led to more visits to school health offices and put an extra strain on school nursing staff.
This can be a huge burden for nurses, who are the only medical professionals at a school. Unlike a hospital or clinical setting, nurses don’t have a team of medical professionals to work with if a student has a problem.
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Following a challenging 2022-23 school year, Framingham Public Schools has implemented staff support changes to help nursing staff cope with the increased burden caused by the pandemic.
“We meet every two weeks to talk about what’s going on and try to have a sense of camaraderie. — “We’re all seeing the same children, we’re seeing the same illnesses, we’re all having the same issues and concerns with the parents,” Medina said.
Shavonne Lord, director of health and wellness for Framingham Public Schools, said the district has put significant resources into supporting school nurses and developing strong social and emotional support systems to address students with mental health issues.
“A tremendous amount of resources have been put into supporting the mental health and wellbeing of students over the last few years,” Lord said. “Each school has a strong group that is really committed to supporting the mental health of students. What’s unique about Framingham is that they’ve put together a team at the district level that they hire into the school to provide mental health support and crisis response as needed. You don’t see that many other schools doing this.”
Some school nurses feel demonized by COVID-19
Steyer, who oversaw health for Framingham Public Schools during the pandemic, said a big problem was that nurses and health care workers were praised at the start of the pandemic, but by the time students returned to school, that sentiment had changed.
“Nurses started out as heroes and ended up as villains,” she said. “They were on the front lines at first, some of our Framingham nurses working 60-plus hours a week working with the Board of Health and doing contact tracing, and people were so grateful we were there. But by the end of the pandemic, nurses had no choice but to become the COVID police.” — “There was a (negative) shift in all of the public health workers, telling people to get tested, telling them they have to stay home and not go to school.”
Medina said that in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, students with cold symptoms such as runny noses were sent home from school, a move she said was necessary to keep students safe but that led to difficult conversations with parents.
“Normally, we would never send a child home with a runny nose, but we had to,” Medina said. “During the period when we were doing contact tracing, we were asked to call families who tested positive and ask very in-depth questions about their lives. — And a lot of families were apprehensive about giving us that information, and rightfully so. It gave them the impression that we were trying to get other information to use against them, and it changed people’s perception of school nurses.”
Nurses point out that public understanding of the role of school nurses has improved
Steyer spoke about potential solutions to address the nursing shortage. — Beyond increasing salaries — The goal is to highlight the importance of the work school nurses do and ensure that these professions are valued in the community, not only increasing public knowledge of what school nurses do but also educating future nurses about the unique challenges of working in schools.
“Nurses are entering the field, and many of them are new nurses and new to school health,” Styer said. “Unfortunately, many underestimate the specialty and are not prepared for the complexity of the work.”
