@Bradford, Do any of the schools in the district have an on-site nurse? My impression is that the care from school to school and district-to-district can be very variable but that usually you can find at least one school per district with a nurse??
Our school district (granted, it’s a big one, San Francisco Unified) has certain schools that take kids with higher-level medical needs. So those are the schools that have full-time nurses. Other schools have traveling nurses, which would be pretty useless for our regime, which calls for bolusing much more than just “lunchtime” and “snacktime.”
Unfortunately we also have a horrible lottery system wherein we have no idea what school our kid goes to until August, but we’re hoping our older son gets matched to one that has a full-time nurse on staff. If not, he can go to another school for a year or two and then reapply and transfer once Samson goes to school; we’re pretty sure a medical exemption can be gotten for Samson so that he gets preference at a school with a FT NP.
No, we live a rural area–so we only have a “traveling nurse”. The sheer ignorance of even the nurse is enough to elect for home-school. They are only required to have “trained staff” on hand. By “trained”, it means someone who doesn’t really know how to make treatment decisions–just to read a 504-plan.
One thing I will say, from having our kid in preschool with no nurse on staff ever – you just need ONE smart person to be the point person who is on top of his care, and another person who will respond by text.
It doesn’t have to be a person with medical training – heck, none of us do! We’ve found that his teacher Lea is an absolute Godsend … she has just an AA in something child-care related but she’s developed great instincts for treating lows based on Dexcom readings. The head teacher is also really sharp and quick, and she’s super responsive by text message, so if it’s been five minutes and we see he hasn’t gotten a treatment on NightScout, she will immediately go and make sure it’s done.
Is it perfect? No, for sure not. Is it as good as if he was home with me all day? No, definitely not. But it’s still good enough for his A1C to be better than most toddlers out there and for his lows at school to be very minimal.
Of course it sounds like your school system combines bull-headedness and cluelessness with the bureaucracy of public schools, which is the worst of both worlds. Our preschool is under no obligation but they’re also very flexible and willing to go along with our care plans.
I think you also have to feel out the school staff and how they will handle this. Our school district is Amazing, the school nurse reached out to me the minute she heard we had been diagnosed and assured us that we could decide the care plan within their schedule limitations, and pushed hard for the minute Cody was independent with his treatment, that he take over with the nurse on speed dial if my wife and I weren’t available.
The meetings aren’t bad, yes he has a 504 which protects him, but that only results in one meeting a year to make sure there are no changes needed. Other than that he is a normal kid.
We have talked to other parents in other school districts where the support hasn’t been there, and they have had to fight for everything. So I would go talk early to the school to understand how they would handle the situation.
