ALAMANCE COUNTY, N.C. — It’s a big concern for parents to send kids to school, especially if they learn there’s another student in the same class who has some COVID-19 symptoms.

With more Piedmont school systems bringing students back for in-person learning and the number of coronavirus cases rising, school nurses have their work cut out for them.

The Alamance-Burlington school system only has pre-k and Adaptive Curicculum students in class until mid-January. 

It’s a process to make sure students and staff are safe, and it’s only going to get more complicated as more kids come back to school.

“You take one student, one patient, one list at a time and check through it,” explained Amy Widderich, the lead nurse for the school system.

As classrooms across the Triad begin to fill up with students again, so are the nurse’s offices and the brand-new isolation rooms at every Alamance-Burlington school.

“It’s a place where [students] can wait until they are picked up, but it also provides protection to staff, so they’re not also exposed,” Widderich said.

She takes great pride that not a single nurse has left the school district since the pandemic started.

“We’re here to serve kids in our community,” Widderich said. “It’s our calling. It’s what we do.”

The district has added ten more nurses to their staff this year and still have about three more open positions.

School leaders want a nurse in every building.

Daily procedures might have changed, but their mindsets haven’t.

“In any given day, in a school nurse’s office, you could have a child that threw up, a child with a fever and a child with a persistent cough,” Widderich said. 

That doesn’t mean she and the other nurses aren’t being extra cautious.

They have diagrams to delegate case management, logs for cleaning, lists to make sure they have enough PPE and protocols to manage sick kids.

“We definitely have students across our community that are school-aged that have had positive test results,” Widderich said.

The work really starts before kids even come in the front door.

Widderich is trying to be proactive, telling kids and their parents to stay home if they don’t feel well.

Once the students get to school, nurses are doing daily health screenings on children and educating their families on how to be COVID-cautious to keep their kids and their community safe.

“As we have higher cases in our community, chances are we’re going to have higher cases in our school,” Widderich said. “That’s not because the school isn’t doing the right thing or an individual person isn’t doing the right thing. It’s just that there’s a lot of community spread.”

The school system is also in the very beginning stages of working with the health department to try and get COVID tests at schools in order to help staff act quickly if a child does have the virus.