Op-Ed; The school nurse - '90s style
/The Boston Herald
Brown towels. They're the metaphor this morning. They say it all. Brown towels are what the Boston Public School system gives to its kids.
At the Mattahunt Elementary School in Mattapan, brown towels are actually soaked in water, put in plastic bags, frozen, placed in a dorm-size refrigerator in the nurse's office and called "ice packs."
Necessity truly is the mother of invention.
School nurse Marthea Murphy's office is all brown towel: one vinyl cot, a couple of vinyl chairs, bright overhead fluorescent lighting and a phone that rings constantly, though most times there's no one there.
She has no computer, no copier and no fax machine, just piles of index cards and forms to be filed and no secretary or intern to do this. Yet she insists she has one of the nicest offices in the system because she has a sink and a telephone.
Some 800 children, pre-school to grade five, attend the Mattahunt school and 65 have asthma. They're the first to straggle into Murphy's office, where their inhalers are kept. Murphy matches inhalers and children, the kids take big, deep breaths, then head to their classrooms. Most repeat this procedure once more during the day. Nine of the children use nebulizers, machines that force medicine into their lungs, and this is a longer process. But the school now has two machines because one was donated by a parent.
Murphy knows the names and histories of all these children. "Terese was hospitalized 42 times last year," she says hugging the kindergartener. "But she's doing much better now. And this one over here, she's our sweetie baby."
The kids with asthma leave. Other children arrive.
"Who hit you with a snowball? Was it an accident? Go get an ice pack."
Accidents require written reports. Every child who comes through the door requires written assessment.
"My shoulder hurts," a little girl complains. Another has a bloody nose. A boy says he feels sick. A girl says she just threw up.
The phone rings and no one's there and the office door opens again and again and now there's a line of children waiting to be seen.
The boy who feels sick has a temperature of 104.8. Murphy phones his mother at work and sends the child to the couch.
For six straight hours it's like this, one couch and so many needy kids with fevers and bloody noses and fingers caught in doors and conditions that require medication at exact intervals that Murphy never gets a bathroom break, never mind coffee or lunch.
A 4-year old wearing a shortsleeve shirt shivers as she waits in the nurse's office because heat's another thing in short supply here.
"Hey? Want to go shopping while you wait?" Murphy says and directs her to a box of "extra" clothes in the corner.
"Thank you, Mrs. Murphy," the children say, whether they've come for a Band-Aid and a hug, or a tube feeding.
There is one school nurse for every 800 students in the Boston Public School system. Many schools actually share a nurse. Up on Beacon Hill, the talk goes on about excess in the schools, about cutting back and making do. But that's exactly what the schools are doing.
Next Wednesday is National School Nurses Day. The school nurses have issued hundreds of invitations to politicians to come visit the schools they're talking about restructuring. It'll be interesting to see how many politicians show up.
