NPR
Students in Los Angeles went back to school this week online. The Los Angeles Unified School District is planning for in-person classes to resume at some point during the 2020-21 school year, which will mean school nurses and licensed vocational nurses will be key to ensuring COVID-19 doesn't spread. Under the district's plan, nurses will help test more than 600,000 students and 75,000 staff members and also implement contact tracing techniques. It will cost about $300 a student per year, according to LAUSD superintendent Austin Beutner. The plan means a lot of extra work for school nurses, like LAUSD school nurse Stephanie Yellin-Mednick. "Is it going to be mind boggling? It could be," Yellin-Mednick told NPR's Morning Edition. "It'll be questionnaires going home to parents where they'll go ahead and tell us what's going on with the family and the children. And then we'll go ahead and test." She says they'll also use contact tracing, which takes aggressive and widespread followup. And this comes at a time in which LAUSD schools have a massive nurse shortage.