It's amazing how ignorant school personnel, including nurses, can be about asthma. If the kid isn't gasping for breath or turning purple, they feel, it can wait. And many schools don't have a school nurse on premises full time - they have to rotate - and the secretaries and administrators don't want to have anything to do with it.
One of my son's classmate has asthma - not badly, but she does occasionally need an inhaler, and she knows when she needs it. Once in kindergarten, she went to the nurse's office to use it, and the nurse was not there. The secretary wouldn't open the nurse's door to get the inhaler, nor would she call the mother directly - she had the 5 year old call, and since the mom was not home, all the kid could do was leave a message on the voice mail. However, the school did have the mom's cell phone number and the dad's at-work number, AND DIDN'T CALL THEM. Fortunately the child was OK, but her parents were livid. A case of bureaucratic bungling at its finest. |
