Nurses entered school systems over 100 years ago to deal with infectious disease control. The result: fewer students absent from school. With those outcomes, the number of school nurses grew over the years. Today there are about 50,000 nurses employed in schools all over the United States.

Here in Florida, school nurses serve nearly three million students. With a large part of children’s day spent in the classroom, these nurses have a big job. State Department of Health statistics show during a typical day in Florida, nearly 100,000 students will visit the school health room, and nurses will administer more than 80,000 doses of medication. Many health professionals, and parents, would like to see a registered nurse in employed in every school. That, however, is not the case in Bay County.

Betsey Gilliland has been working as a school nurse at Bay High School for three and a half years. In that time she's seen everything from seizures, to passing out, to anxiety attacks. She says she's been lucky so far, and hasn't seen any major accidents yet

The Bay District School system contracts with the Bay County Health Department to provide registered nurses for the schools, but they’re not full time in every school.

Schools fall into three categories established by the State

• Basic Schools - These schools only have nurses one day a week, for four hours and include most of the high schools and elementary schools in the county.
  
• Comprehensive School Health Service - Bay County has seven of these schools: Rutherford High, Everitt Middle, Rosenwald Middle, Cedar Grove Elementary, Millville Elementary, Patterson Elementary, and Springfield Elementary School. These schools have a registered nurse who splits time between two schools, spending 20 hours a week at each of the two schools. They also have full time health support techs on staff.
  
• Full Service Schools - The remaining middle schools in Bay County fall into this category. These schools staff one registered nurse per school and they're at the school 6 hours a day, 5 days a week.

Kathy Soto, the Bay County School Health Coordinator, says the Health Department decided to place full time nurses in middle schools because that's where they believe nurses will do the most good, saying, "we felt that the interventions that we could offer there would be appropriate and we'd be more likely to change risky behaviors." The behaviors she is referring to are things like sex, drugs, alcohol, and smoking cigarettes. She says elementary age children have not been exposed to those things yet, and by high school most teenagers have already formed good, or bad, habits

But habits forming or not, if your child begins having a seizure, or a severe allergic reaction in school, you want someone there who can help immediately. Do schools in Bay County have enough training and enough staff to handle an emergency situation

"You just have to plan for disaster and pray every day the disaster is averted and doesn't happen," says Soto

Three months ago a group of Arnold High Schools students overdosed on anti-depressants at school. There was not a nurse on campus at the time of the incident, and once administrators found out what was going on, they called 911

That's what Kathy Soto says they should have done. She says schools “don't have supplies to take care of drug overdosed kids in school.

What about another type of emergency? Soto says each school is required to have two people, other than the school nurse, trained in CPR and first aid. Administrators know to call 911 in an emergency situation, but it might take a while

"I have been told that it takes 20 minutes to get to some schools. I have serious concerns about that and so do the administrators," Soto says

The Bay County Health Department recorded fifteen 911 calls during the 2006-2007 school year, but there could be more because those numbers were compiled only by schools with a manned health room. They also say 28 students were sent to the ER in other ways than by an ambulance

Schools all have automatic external defibrillators to handle a cardiac emergency until an ambulance can arrive. Each middle and high school has two AED’s and each elementary school has one. They're required to have staff members trained to use them

But even with the additional staff training, Nurse Betsy Gilliland believes students need a full time nurse in every school. "You don't want your child to have an emergency and have no one there to take care of them. I certainly wouldn't want mine.

Health Department officials say it comes down to money. The funding for school nurses in Bay County comes from a couple different places. The State Department of Health contributes just under $580,000, there's $10,000 from an abstinence grant for the Freedom 180 program, and the Bay County School District throws in $56,000

Some counties in Florida have been able to get full time school nurses in each of their schools. Escambia County is one of them. According to the latest information compiled the State Department of Health, the Escambia County School Board spends more than two million dollars on their school health program.