Spearman: SC can’t guarantee every school will have a full-time nurse

As students and parents prepare to return to school amid the coronavirus pandemic, it is unclear whether each school will have a full-time nurse, a top official said Tuesday.

“I cannot guarantee you there will be a full-time nurse at every school in the state,” S.C. Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman said during a Tuesday State House committee meeting.

The recommendation to have a full-time nurse in every school came from a task force of S.C. educators called AccelerateEd, which met earlier this year to form plans for returning to school.

As of June, 166 schools throughout the state did not have a full-time equivalent nurse, according to an AccelerateEd report.

The State reached out to public school districts in Lexington, Richland and Kershaw counties to ask if all their schools had nurses. Richland 1, Lexington 1, Lexington 3 and Lexington 4 all said they will have at least one full-time nurse in every school when in-person classes resume, according to officials from each district.

Lexington 2 has a full-time nurse in every school except for the Lexington Two Innovation Center, but the center is on the same campus as two Lexington 2 schools that do have full-time nurses, spokeswoman Dawn Kujawa said in an email.

The reason why Spearman said she can’t guarantee a full-time nurse in every school is because the decision to hire a nurse is largely made with local dollars, she said.

Hiring a full time nurse and paying his or her benefits costs around $60,000 per year, according to a previous article from The State.

Spearman said she will ask state lawmakers, when they reconvene, to appropriate the money needed to hire a full-time equivalent nurse in every school. That would cost a total of $10 million to $15 million, the department said in an earlier estimate.

South Carolina schools received $216 million from federal CARES Act funding and are able to use that money to hire personnel, including teachers, nurses, etc., said S.C. Department of Education spokesman Ryan Brown.

The state received a separate pot of one-time money through the CARES Act, but government entities often avoid paying salaries using one-time money.

“The best solution would for the state to use general funds to fund school nurses in a manner similar to how we fund school resource officers for those schools and districts that do not have them,” Brown said.

This story was originally published August 4, 2020 at 3:01 PM.