A lot of what happens during the day for a school nurse involves making sure students have what they need to stay healthy to get back to the classroom and focus on their education.
Taking temperatures, dispensing prescription medication, calling parents or conducting school physicals are just a small part of what school nurses do. They also might make sure youth have season-appropriate attire to wear, or help parents find a location for immunizations or find out what is available when you don’t have health insurance. For Paulette Luckett-Grant, RN-BSN, at Berkeley Middle School, it is all of that and so much more, because she is an advocate for quality care, children, women and public health.
Luckett-Grant provides health and wellness information for students and staff and coordinates onsite mobile dental care visits, as well as hearing and vision screenings for eyeglasses.
“I host two clinics in my building twice a year. One is the hearing screening through the Special School District,” she said. “And Vision for Life comes through to test the vision of all the students in the school, and those who fail and whose parents complete a form actually get free glasses.”
And as middle-school children develop into adolescence, they have their own questions for the school nurse.
“I do some counseling regarding talking about the reproductive system and sex,” she said. “A lot of questions come up with that quite often.”
For parents, the school nurse is the knowledgeable and trusted source to find out more about getting health coverage.
“If a child does not have insurance, they ask how to get insurance or get their child seen, and I help with that process and help them get signed up,” she said.
Luckett-Grant also collects clothing and other personal items that students may need.
“I’ve had times where a lot of my children are ill-equipped for the elements,” she said. “They do not have winter coats. I have children who wear shorts year-round. I have children who wear hoodies year-round. This particular winter, it got really, really cold early, so I put a request out on Facebook for coats, gloves, Chapstick and Vaseline, and I actually had people inbox me and mail me stuff to my school to help my kids.”
Luckett-Grant’s mother is a school nurse. However, she started off wanting to be a doctor. She volunteered as a candy striper at the old Regional Hospital in St. Louis. That’s where she got to see nurses in action.
“The nurses did more hands-on patient care; they explained to the patients in their language what the doctors actually did,” she said. “It was more personalized, and I liked that portion better than what the doctors did going person to person to person, while the nurses had a caseload, but at the same time, they kept them during their stay and got to know them.”
During her 20-year career in nursing, Luckett-Grant said she loved working in labor and delivery at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and in postpartum care at Baptist East Memorial Hospital in Memphis. She returned to St. Louis and worked in St. Louis Public Schools, in home health and at People’s Health Centers. She said no matter what, she returned to school nursing.
“It was always about the school,” she said. “A lot of people don’t understand that in a school, the nurse may be the only medical professional that a child may see, ever. “A lot of parents, due to not having insurance or the finances, only seek medical care when the nurse says it’s absolutely necessary.”
Luckett-Grant also encounters complications arising from illiteracy on the part of the adult or not knowing how to access transportation available to them to get the health services the child needs. She helps with all of that.
A major concern for her is the growing numbers of uninsured or underinsured people who are not getting the health care that they need.
“A lot of issues with mental illness are not being addressed,” Luckett-Grant said. “I’m seeing it in young people and they are not getting counseling, or they need to be medicated, and it’s not happening. If they start off dealing with an issue and they don’t treat it, it will only get worse.”
If there was something she could change as a nurse, it would be having the time to get to know all sides of a person.
“If you don’t address the mind, body and spirit, you have a broken person,” she said. “Sometimes you need a little longer and the way medicine is set up now, you’re in and out. And sometimes, it takes several visits to find out everything that’s going on.”
Luckett-Grant was a 2017 finalist in the March of Dimes state Nurse of the Year. She earned a bachelor’s of science in Nursing from Rockhurst College/Research College of Nursing in Kansas City.
“A lot of people don’t consider us to be real nurses, and that’s a personal insult. School nurses go to school just like any other nurse; a lot of us have our bachelor’s or even a master’s; we choose this particular vocation,” Luckett-Grant said. “And my office, you can basically say is triage, because you really don’t know who’s going to walk in – a child or an adult. I don’t just take care of children in my building. I take care of my staff – anybody who walks into the door. I am accountable and responsible for them until they walk back out.”
