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middle or high school,” says Barbara Miller, the other co-coordinator at Fresno State.
The Covid-19 pandemic scrambled the work of school nurses. With students doing virtual learning, nurses couldn’t perform screenings or do health education. Many were assigned to contact tracing and staffing immunization clinics. “It’s been difficult on nurses the last two years and created a lot of burnout,” Miller says.
Despite the importance of the job, some administrators, teachers and parents don’t understand the scope of the role, says Joseph Crisostomo, a school nurse in the Greenfield Union School District in Bakersfield. “We’re often viewed as the person in the front office who deals with Band-Aids and boo-boos, and that’s simply not the case. I didn’t under- stand that myself until I entered the position.” Crisostomo earned his school nurse creden- tial at Fresno State, and, he says,
“Having the knowledge
I learned in the program allowed me to have more clout in decision-making, planning and strategizing to keep
our kids healthy and safe at school.”
Crisostomo worked in hospitals before be- coming a school nurse – the same path that Torres followed. She was an emergency room nurse and relished the adrenaline rush that came in the ER. But a family crisis made her look for a different work environment. “Our son was in high school and hanging out with the wrong crowd and being influenced to do wrong things,” Torres says. She had long shifts, as did her husband in his law enforce- ment job, and their son spent many hours alone and unsupervised.
School nursing offered her more fami- ly-friendly hours, and Fresno State’s creden- tial program was the only one Torres consid- ered. The program is rigorous with the right balance of practicality and research, Torres says. “As a school nurse, you have to figure out how to marry the best practices of nurs- ing with what the education code requires. The School Nurse Services Credential at
Fresno State helped me learn how to navigate that fine line.” It didn’t take long for Torres to realize that school nursing was – as she says – “My calling, and I love it, love it, love it!”
Her switch from the ER to a school campus benefitted her son, Nathaniel. “I was home more, and I could monitor where he was after school. By the time Nathaniel was able to graduate, I was like, ‘Hallelujah, he didn’t die, and I didn’t end up in jail,’” Torres says with a laugh. But Nathaniel did more than graduate from high school. He earned a nomination and an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he is scheduled to graduate this spring. He then will begin pilot school.
Meanwhile, Torres has brought an important cultural sensitivity to her work as a school nurse. She’s Hmong (Xai is her first name; Liz comes from her middle name, Elizabeth), and she understands the cultural forces shaping the views of health and healing in Fresno Unified’s large Hmong population. In fact, her father is a shaman, a traditional spirit healer in the Hmong culture. Torres respects what her father does, but she also believes in western medicine and never forsakes its best practices. It’s a divide that many Hmong parents straddle, and she tells them: “Just because you believe in one approach doesn’t mean you have to throw the other option out the window.”
Torres brings the same sensitivity in ad- vocating for Fresno students as executive director of Fresno Unified Student Health Services. Recently promoted to that position, she works with nurses across the district. While she has less contact with students and parents, she is no less an advocate.
Recently, for example, Torres learned of a fifth-grader diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes who cares for younger siblings because their adult caretaker has medical issues. “I cried when I heard about his diagnosis because he’d already taken on so much at such a young age, and now he was looking at in- dependently managing his diabetes. That’s hard enough for an adult.”
Torres connected the fifth-grader’s family to one of Fresno Unified’s Wellness Hubs, enabling a team with a nurse, social worker,
psychologist and others to help the family. Torres’ diligence in the case included sitting in on the team’s assessment of the family’s needs. “Sometimes you think you know what a student needs, but you’re not always right. I wanted to make sure I got it right for this child. It turned out, the family’s needs were even bigger than I thought.”
With the Wellness Hub team engaged, the family is receiving social-emotional support, plus home visits from a health educator. “It was a good referral,” Torres says. “When I was a school nurse at a site, I was only able to touch the lives of the students on that campus. But as Executive Director, I can ad- vocate for students across the entire district. My vision is that anytime anyone talks about a student’s academic performance, they remember that a child’s good health is vital, and school nurses are there to serve kids and their families.”
Joseph Crisostomo
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