Clark School Nurse Shortage is Unacceptable, Mom of Diabetic Son Says

Clark mom Jill Burkhard says after her 13-year-old son was suddenly diagnosed with diabetes, she became aware of a school nurse shortage in the Clark school district that she believes has put all students in danger. 

Burkhard told Patch when her son Sammy, an 8th grader at Kumpf, was discharged from the hospital she began contacting administrators to set up a plan for his blood sugar to be checked in school. What she soon found out was that the district was down one nurse with the retirement of Kumpf's school nurse in June, and that on several occasions when a nurse called out, there were not enough district nurses or substitute nurses to cover all the schools, creating an unsafe condition. 

"When I heard nurses were rotating to cover another school, I panicked," she says. "In the first two weeks of him being home, he needs to have his blood sugar checked four to five times a day to gauge what his levels are and how he’s tolerating insulin."

Burkhard says on two occasions, diabetic students at Hehnly had to wait for treatment because the school nurse had left to cover another school. 

"Imagine if this was a teacher who left a classroom unsupervised," says Burkhard. "It just doesn’t make sense to me."

Burkhard has taken her concerns to administrators, but says she's been told that the candidates they had interviewed for the Kumpf position didn't work out for numerous reasons. She believes one of those reasons is because the district does not offer a salary commensurate with candidates' experience, instead offering only entry-level pay – a fact she says she questioned Superintendent Ken Knops about in a meeting last week.

"If you're offering Step 1 and a person has 10 to 15 years experience, that is an insult," she says. "They say they need to be fiscally responsible, but they have the salary there from last year’s retired nurse. They don’t even need to give the new person that entire salary. They have some elbow room. I understand that we need to be fiscally responsible, but at what costs? What are the children of Clark worth to you?"

Burkhard also spoke out at the Board of Ed's Tuesday night meeting, calling for action.

"At a meeting [with administrators last week] I expressed concerns about the Superintendent’s band-aid solution to the Clark Schools nursing shortage," Burkhard told the Board Tuesday. "This solution involved the remaining three full-time nurses to leave their home schools for a period of time and cover the medical/medication needs of the absent nurse’s students. This solution left our schools and children in grave danger without a full-time nurse present.  ... Let me be clear that I am not here only for my son, but to represent all of the children who attend public school in Clark. It unfortunately took my son’s illness for my family to take notice of the Superintendent’s inadequate response to our children’s safety and well-being." 

At that same BOE meeting, the district approved an agreeement with Bayada Home Health Care to provide additional substitute nurses. Also, June Curti, school nurse at ALJ, urged administrators to actively seek a full-time candidate, but assured parents that their children are well cared for. 

For their part, the district says the situation has already been remedied. 

District Assistant Superintendent Ed Grande told Patch that there were only two school days (Sept. 26 and 30) where the district was down a nurse, which occurred when the Valley Road School nurse called out. Grande says although the district has four substitute nurses, one is already the full-time sub at Kumpf and the other three were unavailable on those two days. 

"We took the other nurses – not the nurse from Kumpf school because we wanted to make sure Kumpf was covered with a newly diagnosed diabetic student coming back – but the nurses from the high school, preschool and Hehnly, each covered Valley Road for about an hour and half each," Grande told Patch. "So on two occasions we pulled them each for an hour and a half. And Kumpf has not been without a nurse for five minutes. It's not optimal, but it certainly wasn't a crisis. I'm not trying to underplay this, but to call it a crisis, does not give our school nurses enough credit."

Grande says what the district has now done by approving an agreement with Bayada is provide "a band-aid for the band-aid" to doubly ensure that all the schools are covered when a nurse calls out or accompanies a student on a field trip. 

"The subs were our contingency plan, but we realize now that we need a contingency for our contingency plan," Grande told Patch. "If this happens again, we can call the nursing agency."

Whether Burkhard was the reason behind the change, Grande said the arrangement would have come about organically anyway. 

"The first month of school was not a problem, but with the onset of field trips, we would have had to gone with this plan anyway," he says. 

As to hiring a new full-time nurse for Kumpf, Grande says the district is working on it and that the candidates they interviewed previously didn't fit for various reasons. (The long-term sub at Kumpf was not interested in the position full-time, says Burkhard.)

"It's a shallow pool to chose from," says Grande. "We want to be sure we have a high-quality person and not everyone is a good candidate."

As to whether the district only offers entry-level pay, Grande says it is their rule of thumb, but that they are flexible.

"We try to be conservative," he told Patch. "We try to be mindful of the taxpayers. Clark is a good place to work and we’ve made a commitment to taxpayers where we tend to bring people in at Step 1 to be fiscally responsible. It's a rule of thumb, but that's not to say we are only willing to offer this dollar amount and everyone over this dollar amount is not considered. Finances is one piece of puzzle, but we look at our needs and the best interest of students first. We do what’s best for the kids and we would never compromise the kids. That goes without saying. As soon as this situation arose we put a band-aid on the band-aid, and we are aggressively looking for a full-time nurse and additional subs."

For now, Burkhard says the substitute nurse at Kumpf is wonderful and going above and beyond to make her feel at ease – but that doesn't fix the problem of not having enough nurses for other students, she says.

“It is a very scary time when you are dealing with a medical crisis and on top of it not having the security or the comfort that while your child is in school he’ll be taken care of," Burkhard says. "It’s a shame that it has to take someone shoving things in their face for them to recognize a very serious medical need. If I didn’t speak up, would they be addressing this as they are right now? It's unfortunate that it took my son being diagnosed with an illness for this to come about.”