The Wall Street Journal recently described “School Nurses New Role in Children’s Health.” This provoked Da Coach to think about possibilities of turning over all school health and physical education to school nurses. Why not? They couldn’t do any worse than the current situation.
Why waste time pretending to teach kids to survive and thrive in our over-nourished, stressed-out, inactive society when they can get first-class school-based medical care right down the hall?
Obesity among school-age children has more than tripled in just the past 20 years, and 33% of students are obese or overweight (over fat). According to the article's author, the real sickness story is that all this fat carries serious mental and physical health issues, including depression and a growing number of diabetes cases.
With more and more obese kids manifesting chronic disease, school nurses are being overwhelmed with students needing more sophisticated medical care than traditionally has been provided. It has become such a trend that school-based health centers are opening. “Clinics usually are inside or adjacent to school building, with a medical staff including pediatricians and nurse practitioners who can bill services to Medicaid and private insurance,” Laura Landro reports.
Apparently, school-based health (sickness) centers have nearly doubled in number since 1998 to about 2,000. “The Obama administration’s new health law appropriated $200 million through 2013 for the centers to build new facilities, purchase equipment and expand services,” according to the article. Besides reimbursements, school-based health clinics’ funding comes from state and federal government grants and private foundations. Some clinics are operated by nonprofit hospital systems.
Wow, this is an interesting development.
Da Coach can see a shift from our old-and-tired health and physical education to real sickness care education. Why waste time pretending to teach kids to survive and thrive in our over-nourished, stressed-out, inactive society when they can get first-class school-based medical care right down the hall? Forget prevention and quality health and physical education. Parents and school officials don’t seem to care about it anyway.
Besides, at current levels of increased childhood obesity and chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes and hypertension, who knows how early American kids are going to need these quasi-medical interventions?
Besides, quality health and daily physical education have been almost abandoned by many school districts across the nation anyway. So, well … perhaps times have just changed and we can forget about disease prevention and health promotion as a core value of American education.
Anyway, parents who want their kids to experience real health and fitness can send them out for a sports team. Those not ready for sports, go see the school nurse.