School Nurses: We Have Been Here All Along

In honor of National School Nurse Day, guest author Dr. Thomas Stinson, a school nurse and AFT member, talks about the vital role of school nurses which has been amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic.

How many people actually know what school nurses do? Probably not many. This is undoubtedly why, as National School Nurse Day approached, one of my mentors asked if I was willing to write a blog. As a practicing school nurse in an urban public school since November of 1997, I thought this was a great opportunity to share my perspective on the important role school nurses play within society which has been amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

A Black Policeman's Sister On Police Reform And Police Unions

My late brother was a police officer and, before his retirement, our late grandfather was the Acting Commissioner of Public Safety in the U.S. Virgin Islands. So it’s fair to say that I come from a police friendly family. Before coming to work for the Shanker Institute and before that, the AFT, I worked for the AFL-CIO alongside trade unionists from all trades and professions. So it makes it all the more painful to see the asinine responses that police unions have had to charges of police bias and brutality toward African Americans, especially since these charges can so easily be proven to be valid (see hereherehere and here). And, as the mother of a Black male teen, I am terrified to send him out into the world where his very existence may be seen as a threat (see herehere and here).

One of ironies here is that recent calls to “defund the police” and “reform the police,” if executed with rational foresight, would actually go a long way to making the job easier for rank and file police officers. I remember my brother telling me that the call he hated the very most was responding to a person who was having a psychiatric episode. He thought that breaking up a fight or a robbery or even a murder would be preferable, because he had been trained how to respond in those situations. With mental instability, he had no clue: Should he try to talk them down? If they were violent, what was the proper use of force? How should he defend himself and others? Or should he just wait for medical personnel to arrive? In every case, he had to play it by ear. The call to “defund the police” is not actually a call to abolish police departments, as some on the Right have claimed. Instead, it’s a proposal to move some police funding to other municipal agencies that have more expertise in addressing the social ills that are now dumped on police departments as a last resort—such as mental disability, homelessness, alcohol and drug abuse, etc. The proposal, then, is to strengthen local social services to the point that they can relieve police forces of some of the functions that they are disastrously ill equipped to handle.

NAEP And Public Investment In Knowledge

As reported over at Education Week, the so-called “sequester” has claimed yet another victim: The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. As most people who follow education know, this highly respected test, which is often called the “nation’s report card," is a very useful means of assessing student performance, both in any given year and over time.

Two of the “main assessments” – i.e., those administered in math and reading every two years to fourth and eighth graders – get most of the attention in our public debate, and these remain largely untouched by the cuts. But, last May, the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, decided to eliminate the 2014 NAEP exams in civics, history and geography for all but 8th graders (the exams were previously administered in grades 4, 8 and 12). Now, in its most recent announcement, the Board has decided to cancel its plans to expand the sample for 12th graders (in math, reading, and science) to make it large enough to allow state-level results. In addition, the 4th and 8th grade science samples will be cut back, making subgroup breakdowns very difficult, and the science exam will no longer be administered to individual districts. Finally, the “long-term trend NAEP," which has tracked student performance for 40 years, has been suspended for 2016. These are substantial cutbacks.

Although its results are frequently misinterpreted, NAEP is actually among the few standardized tests in the U.S. that receives rather wide support from all “sides” of the testing debate. And one cannot help but notice the fact that federal and state governments are currently making significant investments in new tests that are used for high-stakes purposes, whereas NAEP, the primary low-stakes assessment, is being scaled back.

How Many Schools Don't Have Nurses?

In 2006, the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) commissioned the largest and, to my knowledge, most recent national survey on the availability of nursing services in U.S. public schools. It was administered to a sample of over 1,000 schools in all 50 states and D.C.

The primary purpose was to gather basic information on the health staff in these schools, as well as a few core characteristics, such as school size and student demographics.

I must confess that I was a little surprised by the results. Here is the distribution of schools by nursing availability, summarized very briefly (these proportions vary by school size, type and other characteristics):

Privatization's Dark Side

Privatization advocates argue that private sector workers deliver comparable services more cheaply than their public sector counterparts. The truth is that sometimes they can, but very often they can’t. And, as documented by a recently-released General Accountability Office (GAO) study on federal outsourcing, the savings can sometimes come at a very high price, including employees’ lives.

The GAO reports that contractors have been awarded billions of dollars in federal contracts, despite having histories of federal safety, health and labor law violations. Some of violations have been extensive and serious. One food supplier was cited more than 100 times for health and safety infractions, including one instance in which a worker was "asphyxiated after falling into a pit containing poultry debris." This same employer was later ordered by a federal court to "properly compensate" more than 3,000 workers.

Another contractor violated fair labor laws when it "coerced employees" and in another incident refused to rehire a worker due to "prior union involvement." This federal contractor has been ordered to pay $4.4 million in back wages to 2,100 employees since FY 2005. It also agreed to pay nearly $300,000 in back wages to African-American workers after a discrimination suit.

The list goes on and on. GAO auditors found that half of the 50 largest fines levied by the Labor Department between fiscal 2005 and 2009 were aimed at 20 federal contractors. The DOL’s Wage and Hour Division which oversees federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labor requirements, assessed these contractors for more than $80 million in back wages. Despite these problems, in fiscal 2009, the government awarded these 20 worst companies more than $9 billion in contracts. None lost their right to bid for federal contracts, even temporarily.