BENTON, Ark. – As the return to school comes amid a massive spike in COVID cases, educators are working overtime behind the scenes to try to keep children safe.
On the front line, school nurses.
School districts across the state have shifted their health teams from treating sprains and dispensing medication to tracing contacts, often performing both tasks at the same time. In the Benton School District, nurses are nearly overwhelmed trying to track every exposure and every positive case that pops up, from students to employees themselves.
“We have children coming and going, we have teachers and staff coming and going,” said Isabella Bradley of Benton Public Schools.
She adds that in addition to nurses, everyone from teachers to administrators is participating to try to make sense of the numbers, answering questions from parents and alerting families to close team contact calls.
Jacqueline McEuen, director of health services for the Little Rock School District, says cases like these haven’t been seen in over a year, if at all.
“Our highest month of COVID cases was January of last year, and we saw over 350 cases,” McEuen said. “This first week of January back on campus, we saw over 300 people in this first week [alone].”
McEuen said she’s proud of district nurses for doing two jobs at once – and adds that a unique challenge of contact tracing at a school is the urgency of alerting families to a close contact, as children will need to be brought home or checked as soon as possible. to avoid an epidemic.
McEuen and Bradley say the best way for families to help during this chaotic time is to stay patient, keep their children home if they’re not feeling well, and report positive cases when they occur.
Comments are closed.