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SALT LAKE CITY -- Utah's lawmakers are being asked by a fellow lawmaker to follow around a school nurse for a day. Senator Karen Mayne is pushing the shadow a school nurse program.
"In the month of October, my colleagues will have the opportunity to go to their neighborhood school in their district to be with their nurses for an hour or two hours, and so they will know what their nurses do in their school district every day," said Mayne.
Mayne says she hopes that if lawmakers see how busy and how stretched the school nurses are now, they'll be sympathetic to the nurse's situation when it comes time to go over the budget.
Registered school nurse Janet Bryner says every day she's in charge of the health of 6,500 kids in nine different schools in the Granite School District.
"We have students in classrooms who have life-threatening allergies, who have seizure disorders, who have immune difficulties," said Bryner. "Fortunately most of the parents have healthy children, and so they are somewhat immune to what really is in a school situation."
Mayne says her challenge for now is to try and keep the number of school nurses from dropping, with the end goal of increasing the numbers because of the Utah's young population that keeps growing.
Bryner says Utah is last in the country when it comes to the number of nurses per student in the public school system.
E-mail: rjeppesen@ksl.com
