Elementary school nurses work to make a difference
One nurse at Northeast Elementary School talks about her day to day experience
MERIDIAN, Miss. (WTOK) -“To have a child say you’re my nurse or see me at the grocery store and say that’s my nurse—I think everyone in the district would say that’s the most rewarding, that they see me as their nurse.”
All nurses have a calling to their career, for Sheri Shelby working in the school system seemed like a perfect fit after working as a pediatric nurse.
The word normal isn’t used often when discussing the day-to-day lives of nurses in school but they do have days that are far less hectic than others.
The biggest adjustment for nurses came when the pandemic began in 2020. Schools and nurses worked together to ensure a safe environment for students.
“COVID just came in and we had to ten times fold what we were doing to begin with. We had to look at not only the student and not only the staff and our school community be we were looking at our classrooms, what do they look like, our buses what do they look like?”
“We had to look at isolation rooms. We had to look at keeping not only our students safe and our faculty safe but our faculty---the community and their families because it affected everyone as a whole not just that one student but the student’s family.”
In the end the rewards outweigh it all and none of it could be done without the community.
“We had tremendous community support working with our churches and just group—any types of groups that were donating supplies. Our central services---our central office was working to try to help the whole community be able to stay in school.”
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