Schoolnurse’s Weblog

     A 2004 health survey of New York third-graders found that 21 percent were obese.  Starting this school year, New York state is going to track obesity in schools outside NYC.  I think it is great, School Nurse have been taking heights and weights on all our students for years.  We use this information to counsel individual parents if their child has growth/weight issues or an eating disorder.  Now there is an opportunity to use the information we collect and make a difference in the health of our entire population.   I am hoping that we will be able to get funding for wellness programs and Health teachers at the elementary level.  

   In New Rochelle have database software called eschool plus that at this point is used mostly for managing demographic and attendance information on our students.  There seems to be potential for using eschool for managing medical information, but at this point its usefulness is limited as far as the Nurses are concerned.  My boss’s secretary, Ginny, is a genius, she figured out a way to use eschool to gather heights and weights for this mandate.  The program automatically calculates BMIs, and can export them in Excel.  Our department can meet the state requirements with some extra training and effort.   

      Some of the Nurses in our district got together today to firm up how we are going to gather, save, and submit the BMI information.  Ginny whipped up a training program “BMIs in eschool for Dummies” that was great.  she showed us how to do searches, and input growth information on individual students.  I figured out how to enter growth information on an entire class on one screen, saving time.  Ginny and I are going to post directions in a day or two.