When you hear the words “school nurse,” you probably think of a woman sitting in an office while a procession of children come to her, complaining that “I just threw up and need to go home,” or “I got hit in the face by a soccer ball and need you to stop my nose bleed.”
Mary Girardi of Streamwood High School says her job includes problems like that. But it also includes attacking the coming flu season by making sure a hand sanitizer station is mounted in the lunchroom and putting posters in the restrooms urging teens to “keep calm and wash your hands.” The job also includes figuring out what special accommodations have to be made so a teenager with a special medical condition can ride along on a bus field trip the next day. And it also includes meeting with parents, teachers and counselors to draft a plan that will allow a teen to keep attending classes even though she has seizures, or diabetes, or a hearing defect, or attention-deficit disorder, or cancer.
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And Girardi has been doing that all so well over the past 16 years in various Elgin District U46 schools that on Saturday the Illinois Association of School Nurses named her the Illinois School Nurse of the Year during a that group’s annual meeting in Oak Brook.
Girardi, a Registered Nurse with a master’s degree from the University of Illinois, said she sees school nursing as an extension of the kind of work with sick children and pregnant women that she did for the first 16 years of her career, working for various home-health services and hospitals.
“I was working on plans for moving children who have catastrophic illness from their homes out into the community,” she says. She says that gave her the itch to see farther into the children’s lives once they were again attending school and living with their families, and that is a big part of what she does as a school nurse.
Making the career move “was the best decision I ever made,” she said.
After passing the educational courses and testing to become a Certified School Nurse, she is qualified to create plans for students with special medical problems. During her first 15 years with District U46, she worked with the individual Registered Nurses assigned to five or six elementary or middle schools. While the RNs at each school dealt with each school’s day-to-day student illnesses and injuries, Girardi would go from building to building, drafting care plans for students with special problems and conferring with the RNs about how well those plans were working.
Her areas of responsibility included Hillcrest, Creekside, Century Oaks, Horizon and Spring Trail elementary schools as well as Tefft Middle School.
Not until this fall did Girardi take the leap up to the high-school level, where she is responsible for just one school but must do both the care planning and the day-to-day work with sick students.
“High school students are in the process of getting comfortable with the person they are becoming,” she said. “They’re interested in learning more about caring for themselves, developing healthy living skills, and learning more about health conditions.”
To qualify for the statewide award, Girardi said, she had to write essays and send in examples of her work, such as care plans she had drafted for students and health-education campaigns she had organized.
Monday mornings in autumn, Girardi said, usually include visits from Streamwood High football players who suffered some kind of insult to their bodies during the weekend game and were treated on the sidelines by the team trainers but now are still feeling the effect and want to be checked over by the school nurse.
More of the Monday-morning flow of students in and out her office amounts to triage, she added. A student has developed some kind of ache or pain or sickness. But rather than keep him home, perhaps needlessly, or send him to a doctor, with a perhaps needless medical bill, Mom and Dad have sent their child to school with instructions to have the nurse check it out and decide whether the students needs to go home and/or see a doctor.
Girardi said that’s a function that would be familiar to the women she calls “the patron saints of school nursing,” Lillian Wald and Lina Rogers. Community nurses in New York City in the late 1800s, Wald and Rogers were sent into the public schools after school officials noticed an increasing number of students becoming absent. “They were given 30 days to solve the problem,” Girardi said. She said that proved a little over-ambitious. But the nurses made such progress working with the absent children’s families that New York decided to assign nurses to its schools permanently.
“School nurses are definitely among the dedicated unsung heroes in our school system,” said District CEO Tony Sanders. “They provide great health care services to students, ensure they’re educated about self care, respond to emergencies and more often, prevent them.”
Altogether, District U46’s 53 schools employ 60 Registered Nurses and 18 Certified School Nurses.
“With 40,000 students, almost every health problem there is shows up,” Girardi said.
“The care, support, and knowledge she provides to the students of U46 is beyond compare,” said Health Services Supervisor Jeffrey Judge. “I am proud and very grateful to have Mary representing the health services department.”
Also on Saturday, the nurses association gave Girardi an achievement award for helping the organization earn the necessary credentials to offer professional development and continuing education units, saving members time and money.