School Nurses: Coordinating Care Through a Community/School Health Partnership

School nurses coordinate student health care for prevention and treatment to remove health barriers to learning and to school attendance. They use a team approach to manage students with chronic conditions as they transition among home, school and healthcare settings, working to develop competent self-care aligned with developmental ages of students. Care coordination ensures the continuum of care is unbroken. Meeting the health needs of low-income students can be challenging, because those students are likely to be uninsured or underinsured and often lack necessary resources, such as transportation, to access primary health care. Care coordination is a tenet of school nursing and to optimally serve low-income students, school nurses form partnerships in the community. One innovative and successful partnership is Healthy Learners, an organization that works with community healthcare providers and school district nurses to connect eligible students to needed healthcare services. Always, the goal is to keep students in school, healthy, and ready to learn.