About that lack of funding for school nurses...

I can say with confidence that nobody was going to call 9-1-1 for my asthmatic kid, and probably wouldn't have until the inhaler didn't show up in the backpack - which might have been too late. This week, one of my diabetics asked for help calculating his insulin dosage. It was the first time he's ever asked for help, and only did because his scale changed the day before and I happened to be sitting there. I know him well enough to say with certainty that he would not have asked the secretaries to call me had I not been sitting there, and he thought he didn't need any insulin when he actually needed 3 units.

That being said, we are not miracle workers, and it breaks my fragile little heart when I'm expected to be one. For example, I have a girl with a club foot at one of my schools, and she requires special shoes. The shoes are made for FREE by a local hospital, but the mother needs to take the initiative to do that. I went at this issue for weeks when I first started (back in the day, before I ever started being worn down by these kinds of parents), calling the hospital, calling the mom, talking to the daughter. Coincidentally, I called the mother the same day a CPS report was filed by the counselor for a suspected abuse issue. The witch of a mother assumed it was me who had called CPS, did who knows what to her daughter, and tried to hunt me down at the main office (I was at another school). The daughter, who previously visited me consistently every single week, won't even make eye contact with me now when she sees me in the hall. I will not call that mother again; I don't want her to hurt the girl. I've explained this all to the yard duty who comes to my office almost weekly to tell me we need to do something about the girl's shoes. There. Is. Nothing. I. Can. Do. She keeps asking me to ask the nurse who had my school previously to do something, and when I've passed this along to her she has the same frustrated reaction. We aren't miracle workers, and even if it looks like we're failing sometimes, it's not for lack of trying.