School nurses reflect on ‘mountain of tasks’ that two years of pandemic work brings

Kori Mauch jokingly refers to being a school nurse as being on a remote island.

She said her days are often filled with health-related issues, from Band-Aids to paper cuts, diabetes, seizure disorders, distributing medicine and preventing emergencies.

However, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic two years ago, Mauch said that COVID-19 has taken over about 90% of her day. She’s the department chair and oversees all COVID-19 scenarios at Sycamore Community School District 427. There are 17 nursing staff across the district, including Mauch and six other nurses and 10 health assistants.

Mauch said that the majority of school health care workers’ time this school year has been spent doing data management, including completing spreadsheets and tracking positive COVID-19 cases and student and staff close contacts. At times, especially during an omicron variant-fueled virus surge during the 2021 holidays, schools in the Sycamore, DeKalb and Genoa-Kingston districts had hundreds of students with the virus and more than a thousand combined in quarantine within the three largest district’s in the county.

Much of the contact tracing for that period fell on the shoulders of school nurses.

Mauch said that the pandemic has been the most challenging aspect of her job.

“With students back in the building, [COVID-19] has given us a mountain of tasks in front of us every day,” Mauch said. “The last few months have been very busy with holiday breaks, omicron and significant changes to guidance.”

Kristin Perez, a certified school nurse with DeKalb School District 428, said that her job has changed with the pandemic. There are 23 nursing staff across the DeKalb school district, including Perez and three other certified school nurses, 11 other nurses and eight health assistants.

“I can definitely say that our jobs do not look like what they did pre-[COVID-19],” Perez said. “We’re getting back to normal, but it’s not here yet.”

When someone in a school building presents with a symptom as simple as a sore throat, treatment for such symptoms has changed significantly.

“Before, if a kid comes to the health office with a sore throat, we’d have them drink water, check their temperature, have them rest a bit and if they’re feeling better, they could go back to class,” Perez said. “But now, with any symptom of [COVID-19], we have to rule [COVID-19] out first. The way we approach symptoms has changed.”

Mauch said that every school building has different work hours, such as the middle school from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

“We have normal work hours, no second shifts or overtime, and we all have more on our plate,” she said. “There’s always more work waiting for us the next day.”

Nursing staff members also are tasked with following up with students and their guardians about virus symptoms, protocols and guidance from the Illinois Department of Public Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, with the decline of cases in the past month and rolling back of mandates, many districts, including Sycamore, are no longer requiring students who are exposed to the virus to quarantine unless they test positive.

Sycamore and DeKalb schools now recommend masks but don’t require them.

Perez said that after clocking out at the school building they work, DeKalb nurses often worked until 9 or 10 p.m. In DeKalb, other non-mask mitigations have remained in place for the time being.

“We put in hours and hours of our own time because it is all very time-sensitive,” Perez said. “We wanted to let families know as soon as we were notified of a case. We worked until very late at night to do our due diligence to notify families. … We are the dreaded phone call, the phone call no parent wants to get. We don’t want to exclude kids, but we have to. This is the world we live in right now.”

As months and years have passed since the pandemic began, Mauch said that dealing with COVID-19 has become more routine.

“Testing, educating, assessing and communicating regularly with the health department feels routine,” Mauch said. “There’s less fear than there was at the start of the pandemic. It’s become more day-to-day management of it.”

Doug Porter, school counselor at Huntley Middle School in DeKalb, said that throughout the pandemic, his job has remained the same: supporting students, teachers, parents, administrators and other school counselors.

“We’re here to counsel, network, share resources and share a safe space, snack or whatever is needed,” Porter said.

He said that what he loves about his job, the unpredictability, also is what makes it difficult.

“You never know what you’ll deal with on a daily basis,” Porter said. “You respond to the need and provide support to whomever walks through your door. We’re constantly having to adapt on the fly to the unpredictable: new expectations, new rules, new guidance and new directives.”

Mauch said one positive about the pandemic is that it has brought recognition to the health care and nursing fields.

“We’re getting recognition, thank yous and support we haven’t gotten in the past,” Mauch said. “We’ve always done our job, which is keeping students and staff safe while in the school building. I think the community at large has a greater appreciation for school healthcare workers. They’ve seen that we play a critical role in an educational setting.”

Although Porter said his personal perception is that stress levels have been higher since the start of the pandemic, he doesn’t have a lot of conversations that focus on the pandemic. Instead, people seem to want to talk about the pandemic’s impacts on their daily lives.

“Everyone is trying to focus on what they can control versus what they can’t,” he said. “You have to use your supports to help you be the best version of yourself. You can feel anxious, depressed, alone and terrified, but there are people who want to help you, who can support you.”

Perez said she is happy to see COVID-19 case numbers decrease and, with new mitigations, school return to a new normal.

“We keep our fingers crossed that it continues on that path,” Perez said. “We just want everyone to be safe and healthy.”