HAMPTON — A brown-haired girl muffles a constant cough as she walks into the clinic at Booker Elementary. She shows a freshly-ripped thumbnail to the nurse.
Martha Wayman bandages the thumb, listens to the girl's lungs with a stethoscope, then calls her mother to recommend cough medicine.
Next year, students may not find such quick help when they stop by their school's clinic.
Every school will open with a full-time nurse but may lose them through attrition. When nurses resign, schools with 299 or fewer students will be allotted a half-day nurse. Four schools have enrollment lower than 300 in Hampton.
The shift is a casualty of a $7.6 million shortfall in the district's budget.
Losing full-time nurses will move the 22,500-student school system at least a decade back in progress, said Linda Lawrence, the district's health services coordinator.
The responsibility for health care will fall to teachers and secretaries if a nurse isn't available, Wayman said, and staff will have to dial 911 if they can't handle a situation.
At Booker, Wayman works daily with two diabetic fourth graders. They measure their blood sugar in her clinic, count carbs after they eat lunch and calculate how much insulin they need.
Students with asthma drop by her office to puff on their inhalers. Others come in with stomach aches to lie down. A line forms after lunch time of students who need daily behavior medication.
Chronic illnesses have shot up in the past few years, Lawrence said. As of October, there were 3,300 asthmatic students and 780 received inhalers at school.
There were 149 students with documented seizure disorders, 1,612 students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. About 140 students have epi-pens at the school clinic for severe food allergies.
Without a full-time nurse on staff, the burden to treating students will cut into a teacher's day, Wayman said. She's worked at Booker for six years.
"It'll be hard for everybody," she said. "If the kids are sick, they may not be learning. I just don't think teachers should have to be nurses, they are busy, busy, busy."
Fourth-grade teacher Nancy Trimble has worked at Booker for 36 years and remembers the days when nurses weren't there full time.
"Now we much more readily send a child to the clinic because we know there's an expert there," she said. "If someone's not there, we'd have to screen them more carefully, which takes us away from instructional time."
And since she's not a triage nurse, Trimble said there's more room for error when untrained staff members treat children.
She sends children to Wayman about three times a week for everything from diabetes treatment to sore throats.
"She's very alert to every child's needs," Trimble said. "She personalizes every child."
As more parents lose jobs and insurance because of the economy, Wayman anticipates them depending even more on school nurses.
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