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March 6, 2010

Can hospital help nurse program?

Dalton Daily Citizen

DALTON — If ever there was the chance for the local school districts to get creative about how they could save some money while still preserving student services, this could be it.

Earlier this week, members of the Whitfield County Board of Health learned that the Dalton and Whitfield County public schools nurse program is once again the possible target of state budget cuts.

Whitfield County Schools superintendent Katie Brochu, who is a member of the board, said she is “very, very worried” about the possible elimination of the program and that because of rising unemployment and parents lacking health insurance, school nurses are often the only medical care some children receive.

“It’s really a very serious concern ...,” Brochu said.

She is right.

At a time when health care for many households is getting harder and harder to afford, programs like the school nurse program have become more critical.

Currently, Dalton Public Schools and Whitfield County Schools contract with the health department to provide nurses at elementary and middle schools. There are no nurses at the high schools.

During the 2008-2009 school year, there were 11 nurses from the health department spread throughout the county school district’s middle and elementary schools. For the current school year, that number has dropped to six. They rotate through the elementary and middle schools. The system pays the health department $232,771 for the nurses.

Dalton Public Schools has six school nurses — one for each school — and pays the health department $291,938.

For both school districts that is a healthy chunk of change to spend on a service that isn’t directly tied to their main mission of educating students. And with the budgets for both districts getting tighter, it is understandable that officials are looking at the money as a way to stave off some of the cuts that they know they are going to have to make.

But if we as a community get creative, this doesn’t have to be an all or nothing game.

It seems to us that it is worth exploring whether Hamilton Health Care System would be willing to pick up the tab for either all or some of the program.

Hamilton has the expertise and the nursing help to effectively staff such a program, and since it doesn’t currently pay any property tax into either system it would be an appreciated gesture of goodwill.

Perhaps there are cost savings that could be achieved if the nursing program is run jointly by both systems and nurses could visit schools in both Dalton and Whitfield County on the same day.

To help solve our schools’ funding crisis, we have to start thinking of it as an all-of-us problem and not just a school’s problem.

Striking a partnership between the hospital and the schools to preserve school nurses won’t solve this mess. But it would be a step in the right direction.

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