South to “Achoo!” less with new full-time licensed nurse

Nurses in school are undeniably important. Many students go home sick every day, and many others have to see the nurses daily. There are two new nurses here at South High: Jim Johnston and Gracie Davitt. Jim Johnston is fully licensed and is a full time nurse at South, and has worked at Newborn Intensive Care for many years before going to work for a managed care organization. He believes he will have a positive effect at South: “The whole purpose of having nursing in a health office is to make sure that the students are safe at school so my role is to make sure that things are in place so that every kid has the best chance at being safe and healthy in school for their academic success.”

He believes being nurse at South will be a “great challenge,” saying: “There’s a lot of kids here, a lot of diversity and I think it’s gonna be a very rewarding and challenging job.”

Johnston hopes to be influential and necessary: “It’s hard to say being as new as I am but I think that as I get to know the school and the students that I think that ‘yes, I can’ and the health office can make an impact on the kids”

According to Johnston, with the nursing team fully staffed: “We’ll be able to do more education and maybe outreach to the students and staff and the overall health culture of the school.”

The nursing program does have some problems but he is working to solve them. “We’ve already done a lot with making sure that all the records are up to date and current.” He went on to say that: “It’s more or less making sure that we’re all trained in the jobs that we have because there’s three of us that are brand new here there’s two school nurses and there’s a health aide that is new here and it’s making sure that we are all working together as a team and backing each other up so a problem that comes up may just be a matter of [us being] all so new here in the school.”

Johnston is happy with how it’s going so far: “It’s going great I’m learning more every day, getting more familiar with the students that come into the health office everyday, like I said it’s challenging but it’s very rewarding. It’s going well.”

Davitt works part time. She believes the nursing program is in a transition this year: “The staff has kinda been shuffled and we were missing staff for a while but now we are fully staffed.” Davitt went on to say: “Now I feel like we’re in a really good place, we have a really good team and I think we’re gonna have a really successful year.”

With a fully staffed health department at South, it looks like not so many kids are going to be going home sick.