Schoolnurse’s Weblog

My name is Alison Fricke and I am a School Nurse at Trinity School in New Rochelle, NY. I recently became a graduate student at NYIT in the Instructional Technology program. I bring a love of learning, teaching, nursing, technology, community, and mankind.

While this blog started out as a school assignment, I am hoping to turn it into a resource for School Nurses. So many School Nurses work in isolation, and cover more than one school. They do not have the opportunities to share ideas and resources, or vent frustrations. In some school districts the gym teacher is the boss of the School Nurse. Whenever I go to a conference or other gathering of School Nurses, I am appalled at the conditions that they have to deal with every day. I commend them for continuing in thankless and depressing situations.

I am blessed to have an administration that cares about School Nursing, and sees its value. The community I live in is also supportive of School Nurses. We have sensible policies, guidelines for practice and adequate staffing. For instance my k-5 public school has one full time School Nurse, one 28 hour a week School Nurse who works daily, and a third nurse daily from 10 AM to 2PM.

Setting up this blog and the Pbwiki has been like swimming upstream. I keep running into technical difficulties, like Pbwiki does not accept my email address. At the same time I am fighting my notions about blogs. I think of blogs as being in the same category with MySpace and chatting, some mindless activity for kids that I do not want to waste my time on. I am going to keep an open mind, and try to see blogging as a tool. I have to figure out how to edit a comment, I had a typo in one I made to a classmates blog, and I am horrified. I saw it just as I pushed “Say It”,the blog equivalent of “Send”. I won’t do that again.

I am on information overload, and I am trying to figure out how I am going to keep track of all the user names and passwords that I used to set up accounts with B.E.P.T., Google Reader, Flickr, WordPress, Pbwiki, del.icio.us, and the ITEA. Now I feel a little better that I am making my blog useful by putting in these links.