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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- State lawmakers will begin examining this week whether to increase funding to hire more school nurses.
A 2004 analysis by the National Association of School Nurses found that Utah had one school nurse for every 5,800 students, the highest ratio in the country. The ratio recommended by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is one nurse per 750 students.
The Public Education Appropriations Subcommittee will meet on Wednesday to discuss the issue.
"I think it's pretty well accepted that we're the last in the nation," said Sen. Ed Mayne, D-West Valley City. "We're talking to the public education appropriations committee to see what direction they want us to go."
A proposed task force to study the problem was narrowly defeated in the Legislature earlier this year.
The Utah School Nurse Association will need more data on the work nurses do, and how in-school health care helps learning and reduces absenteeism to make an effective pitch to legislators, said Carla Lott, president of the association.
"What we'd like to do is get some coordination among the districts about the data that we collect so that we have some hard data," said Colleen Drake, co-chairwoman of the USNA's government relations committee. "We know that we're well understaffed, but the proof is in the statistics."
Lott said there's actually about one school nurse for every 6,000 students. That's because many of Utah's 129 school nurses work at preschools, and those students aren't included in the federal statistics, she said.
Boosting the number of nurses would cost "$36 million or more a year," according to the state nursing association.
The source of that funding might need to change, said Mayne, who has worked closely with the USNA on this issue.
"There is some thought, and I share this, that we ought to be taking the school nurses right out of student ed and putting them in the health department," Mayne said. "We need to look at something differently."
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Information from: The Daily Herald, http://www.heraldextra.com
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
