By: Foster Curry
People often think that the School Nurse just sees headaches and bruises all day; however, they tend to see all of the health issues that go on at Jenks High School, and sometimes that means saving lives. Nurse Kelly Gorton is one of the Jenks High School nurses and the District Nurse Coordinator for the entire district.
This profile provides an overview of a day in the life of Nurse Gorton and the busy schedule of the Nurses' office department at Jenks High School. A look inside the daily routine will reveal all the effort and investment that goes into a nurse’s practice.
Nurse Gorton has been a nurse for 20 years, and she’s currently in her 11th year at Jenks. School Nurses care for everyone at school, including the staff. They are very important to the well-being of the entire population at Jenks High School. Micah Gunther, Jenks Public Schools’ Assistant Director of Student Programs, emphasized how vital the nurses are to our school. He illustrated how the first place people go when they are sick is the nurses' office, including our staff.
“Without our nursing staff, we would not be able to make it through the day,” said Gunther.
There are so many conditions that Nurse Gorton sees. She ensures that everyone is safe and ready to learn.
“We run like an urgent care or an ER; we take care of a lot of kids, and a lot... A to Z,” said Nurse Gorton. “We have emergencies where we're dealing with seizures, heart conditions, cardiac arrest, diabetes, substance abuse, you know, pretty much anything you can think of.”
Nurse Gorton said that the nurses’ clinic usually sees about 200-250 kids on an average day. Some kids come in regularly to take their daily medications, while others are rare occurrences.
Nurse Gorton pouring medicine into a graduated medicine cup
There are a lot of scheduled medications in the nurses' office, but sometimes there’s an unexpected emergency. Unexpected emergencies sometimes call the nurses out of the nurses' clinic to go to the emergency.
“So the good thing is that we've got two RNs and a health assistant,” she added. “So if somebody needs to go to the emergency at an unexpected time, we always have someone here to manage the clinic, and so it makes it a lot easier to be able to do that.”
On top of all of the health issues they deal with, they also take care of hours of charting each day. They have to document and fill out everything that happened in the nurses' clinic that day. The School Nurse deals with a lot of things that go unnoticed. They make us feel welcome and safe and sometimes save lives.
“I appreciate how our nurses are all about serving others. A couple of years ago, Kelly was part of a team that saved a student’s life,” said Gunther. “They consistently go above and beyond the call of duty to get the job done each day.”
They see so many kids throughout their day that they often don't have time for lunch, so a lot of days can be pretty hard.
“Here it's more of an independent field,” Gorton said. ”So we're doing a lot of these things by ourselves, and having to critically think and make decisions on our own, so I would say that's probably the hardest part.”
Gorton explained how in a hospital setting you work directly with other physicians and nurses, so you have a team that you can bounce questions off of and have support for decisions. In a nurses’ office, you have one nurse and a health assistant, so it's a lot more isolated. Even though there are many difficulties of being the head nurse of thousands of students at Jenks, there are also many joys.
“The best part, I would say, is just being able to help students and keep them at school. Also just being a bright light in the middle of someone's day,” Gorton added, “Sometimes people don't come in here because they're ill. Sometimes they just need 15 minutes. You know they need to kind of get away and rest, or there are a lot of kids that have things going on at home.”
Nurse Gorton emphasizes the importance of being a bright light to the students that she sees every day. She is a big reason why students stay at school and stay healthy.
Nurse Gorton standing outside the nurses' office
When asked what the most rewarding part of her job was, Gorton explained that it was being a helping hand to those in need.
“I would say just helping people, especially in emergencies, you know, when unexpected things happen, being able to take care of them and kind of put them at ease because having medical emergencies can be really scary,” she added.
School nurses deal with a lot more than just simple headaches. They take care of every health issue that happens at the school, even mental health.
“I would say that a lot of people have the idea that school nursing is just Band Aids and ice packs. I get that question all the time whenever people say, what do you do for a living? I'm like, well, you know, that's kind of just a very, very small part, Gorton said.”
So next time you see Nurse Gorton and the entire nurse department, say hello and thank them for all that they do. She does a lot to keep kids safe and healthy at school.
