She deals with the handicapped children who have come into the student body in the past decade, and with their parents. She's also among the first to know who is pregnant, who is being beaten or abused, why certain students hang around after school. The one place an adolescent boy can go to cry is in the nurse's office. We are not threatening and are thought of as people who help. Both are members of the National Asso ciation of State School Nurse Consultants.
School nurses find themselves isolated in the system and without political power.
Paula Johnson of Baton Rouge, La., is a former hospital nurse who turned to school nursing when her children were small and she needed better hours. She, too, worries about the fu ture. Nurses who once spent much of their time doing health screening, occasionally treating a sports injury, or sending a student home be cause of exposure to measles or mumps, are handling everything from the psychological effects of parents' divorce to a rising incidence of youthful hypertension, which Ms. Macdon ough, for one, blames partly on the high salt content of junk food. Beverly Grotsky, a school nurse from Ful lerton, Calif., works in a school system that once had eight high schools with a nurse for each. We lost 10 nurses this summer because of the loss of fed eral funds and have not gotten a new nurse in two years.