His daughter, Elizabeth, has been home-schooled since a scare in kindergarten. Elizabeth's condition was being managed with an insulin pump, but one day her numbers got out of whack and she felt shaky. With no nurse on campus, she was sent outside to wait for her mother on what was an extremely hot day.
"Her mom saw a group of kids in a circle and our daughter unconscious on the ground," said Ehrlich, who yanked Elizabeth out of school. He doesn't want to risk sending her back, but argues that federal law requires accommodations be made for her and other diabetics.
More than 30 states allow nonmedical school employees to administer insulin to students, said a representative of the American Diabetes Assn., which helped engineer the agreement that was overturned earlier this month.
"I happen to believe every school should have a nurse," said California Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell. But given budget realities, the compromise to train campus employees made sense, he thought.
Makes sense to me too. And diabetes aside, wouldn't a full-time nurse mean quicker medical attention for sick kids? Wouldn't it mean better prevention of communicable diseases and closer monitoring of vision and hearing problems that add to teachers' challenges?
These are not trick questions. But we all know they won't be hiring more school nurses any time soon, so here's a tougher question:
What was the California Nurses Assn. thinking when it fought to prevent non-nurses from administering insulin?
Call me cynical, but it's hard not to see it as little more than a ploy to protect nursing jobs, even though the CNA does not directly represent school nurses. If teachers and counselors were allowed to manage diabetic children, it might be a license for public education to further deplete the ranks of school nurses.
No way, insists Donna Gerber, CNA director of government relations. She argued that the judge correctly ruled that California's Nurse Practices Act dictates that only a nurse can handle what can be a complicated job requiring extensive training, so school districts need to find a way to hire more nurses.
"If you make a mistake, it can be fatal," Gerber said.
So we leave the task to an 8-year-old?
Nonsense, said Dr. Francine Kaufman. Nurses are preferable, she agreed, but not allowing a vice principal or teacher to pinch hit "is holding diabetic children back and imperiling their health," as well as unnecessarily disrupting their families' lives.
