Cobb County School Nurses

We the undersigned, as citizens of Cobb County, GA wish to express our support for the nurses who serve our Cobb County schools and students.

We object to the stated intention of the Cobb County School District of eliminating the Itinerant Nurse positions and eliminating, by half, the positions of Area Consulting Nurse.

Combined these positions help to keep our students healthy and safe by providing a valuable service to our schools.

- They act as substitutes to manage the health of our many diabetic students when the daily clinic nurses are absent, so as to prevent parents from having to be called into school for each insulin shot.
- They accompany our diabetic students on field trips.
- They perform multiple in-service trainings for staff in the schools year-round. Such as teaching administrators, cafeteria workers , teachers, specialists and the like, how to recognize the signs of anaphylactic shock and administer lifesaving EpiPens; how to recognize asthma attacks and react; how to use external heart defibrillators in life or death situations; and many other in-service trainings.
- They deal with students physicians in complicated cases, in order to relieve clinic nurses to continue focusing on the ongoing number of students being sent to the school clinics.
- They interface with the Health Department on critical issues such as outbreaks of whooping cough or swine flu. Again to free up the individual school nurses to give full attention to the vast number of students who visit their clinics on a daily basis.
- And many other issues too numerous to list.

We understand that, in this economy, budget cuts must be made. However, we feel that this is an extremely dangerous way to do so. This type of cut in safety should never be among the first choices. Other cuts should be investigated first. In the not so distant future, a childs life, or many childrens lives, may well be compromised. Their safety most definitely will. All this can be easily avoided by simply saving this handful of valuable positions.