Kate King has been a school nurse working with high-need students for 23 years. For as long as she’s worked in schools, she’s noticed a pattern: when students are struggling or don’t like a class, they’ll go to the nurse’s office to avoid it.

When confronted with this “age-old story,” as King calls it, she starts asking questions. Do you not like the class? Is something else going on? She checks their grades. And once she identifies the core issues, she provides the student with wraparound services, engaging school counselors, social workers, teachers and parents.

The main goal? To get students the support they need to return to class as quickly as possible. She calls school nurses “the sentinels,” arguing it’s their role to identify when there’s an issue and then pull together as many people as they can to support that child.

Her current school, World Language Middle School, a bilingual language immersion school in Columbus, Ohio, electronically tracks when students go to the nurse’s office so they can quickly identify these patterns.

“My primary focus — and a school nurse’s primary focus — is that children are in school,” she said. “Many people think our primary focus is to send children home, but actually our focus is to keep kids in school.”

King’s experiences mirror the results of a new study of 21 nurses out of the University of Missouri Sinclair School of Nursing. Researcher Knoo Lee, himself a registered nurse, found that students who have many partial-day absences often seek out school nurses as a source of comfort and support. This puts school nurses in a unique position to intervene before their absences become chronic.

“We discovered something that we haven’t seen before,” Lee told The 74, “where school nurses are actually in a position where they are able to identify students who are going through the early symptoms of partial-day absences.” Knowing that partial-day absences often lead to full-day absences, “we believe from these results that school nurses have the potential to play a key role in terms of really helping out with chronic absenteeism.”

Despite this, school nurses are often left out of policy-making decisions and conversations, Lee found. They also need access to greater support and resources to respond to the challenges students face that impact chronic absenteeism, including mental health concerns, homelessness, lack of transportation and food insecurity. And in order for school nurses to be effective, the report recommends that districts work to make sure schools are staffed with an adequate number who are trained and certified and that they have the needed supplies.

Especially post-pandemic, chronic absenteeism, when students miss 10% or more of school days a year, has proved to be an intractable problem. In the 2020-21 school year, at least 14.7 million students nationwide were chronically absent — more than double the number pre-COVID, according to Attendance Works, a nonprofit that aims to reduce chronic absenteeism. Children living in poverty are two to three times more likely to be chronically absent. Students from communities of color as well as those with disabilities are also disproportionately affected.

Read the full article about school nurses and chronic absenteeism by Amanda Geduld at The 74.