School nurses are being recognized for their work in the St. Joseph School District as part of National School Nurse Day.

Nurse Coordinator, Maria Burnham said this year nurses with the district saw 150,853 students come through their clinics and were able to send most of them back to class.

“That’s the ability of these nurses to assess the situation, see what’s going on with the kids, evaluate, talk to parents, talk to physicians if needed,” Burnham said. “Really we’ve only sent home a little over 6,000 kids which means we’re keeping a big percentage of kids in school ready to learn.”

She said kids come in to see a nurse for many different reasons.

“They may be coming in for their medicine, they may be coming in for a playground injury, we have about 30 diabetics so students may be coming in to check their blood sugar to plan their lunch,” Burnham said. “We have a lot of needs in the buildings.”

Currently every school has a nurse in the building, Central High School has two which Burnham said is due to the school’s large population.

“For a lot of our kiddos they are the actual first health professional that they will see,” Burnham said. “A lot of our kids will wait all weekend and then they’ll go see the nurse for a situation. So it’s our job to keep them healthy and keep them ready to learn.”

This year nurses have also screened more than 5,000 kids for vision and hearing and nearly 5,000 kids for dental.

“We do a lot of screenings,” Burnham said. “We check immunization status of all of our kiddos.”

Wednesday is National School Nurse Day, Burnham said due to the end of the school year on Thursday many nurses were honored last week.

“Normally nurse week kind of coincides with staff appreciation week. That was last week. So a lot of our nurses got honored by their buildings last week along with their other staff members,” Burnham said. “I will honor them, we will get together Friday for our end of the year staff meeting.”