“I substituted at other school districts before here. So my first school year at Clayton was the 2020 year when we went home for spring break and never came back. The nurses didn’t know what was gonna happen and what we were gonna have to do. So during that time, we spent a lot of time connecting with students to make sure that everybody was doing okay. There were some students that I had relationships with and then all of a sudden it was done and we weren’t coming back. It was also kind of frightening. When we came back last year,  I, along with the lead nurse, Heather Chrisman of the district, were pretty much responsible for contact tracing, and that took up almost all of our time. It was intense. So then as a nurse in the community and as a human being in the community I also took it very seriously. We’ve also been doing this for so long. There were still some students that were coming back to in-person learning, even before everybody came back in November.

One thing I think related to COVID that has been a bit more frustrating for me is the vaccine because it’s like available for every person in this building. So to me, every person should be vaccinated to keep our whole community safe, our community at CHS, and in our homes. I just hang my head when someone comes in and tells me like, they don’t feel good like they need to go home. I think we’re doing really good as a community like there’s been hardly any activity as far as needing to quarantine and isolate kids because the county changed their guidelines based on the CDC guidelines. So we really haven’t had to do a lot of quarantining. And contact tracing, so thank God, it’s been so much better this year for that.

It’s been tiring here. This is a busy nurse’s office. “