SAN ANTONIO — School begins for Texas students in just over a month. Administrators are scrambling to make sure students and staff are as safe as possible when they return.
A lot of the planning has to do with nurses. They'll be dealing with the kids directly whenever they have symptoms, whether it is coronavirus or not. Both North East ISD and Northside ISD say they will be ready.
"They are all going to be wearing PPE. They are all assessing each clinic and figuring out ways to make sure that students don't come in to contact with one another when they have to come into the clinic," said North East ISD spokesperson Aubrey Chancellor.
North East ISD is also using technology to prepare nurses for what may come their way.
"There will actually be an app where they let the nurse station know what kind of symptoms the student may be experiencing or if they are just coming down for something routine," Chancellor said.
Their nurses are also taking six to eight hours of online training, with a focus on contact tracing. "Part of what our nurses are receiving training on from Johns Hopkins University is how to do contact tracing and how to do it efficiently," Chancellor said.
The TEA has procured 12,000,000 sets of gloves and 1,000,000 face shields just for staff. For both staff and students, they procured 53,000,000 disposable masks, 18,000,000 reusable masks, 42,500 infrared no-contact thermometers, and 62,000 gallons of hand sanitizer.
"We have been working to stock up on our PPE for many months now. We and many other school districts in the area have received from PPE from the Texas education agency," said Northside ISD Director of Health Services, Jennifer Krueger. If a students shows signs of the virus, Krueger told us, "Our school nurses would be involved in assessing students. We will put our isolation protocols into place based on the nurse's assessment."
Chancellor also told us that they are relying on parents to be responsible, and to keep their child home if they show any sign of being sick.
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