Thousands of Philly students typically lack a school nurse. Parents changed that.
Despite the toxic narrative that parents at neglected schools are less invested in our children's future, we pushed the district to add school nurses. And we're just getting started.
As a Black parent whose child attends one of Philly’s most neglected schools, I know what it’s like to be silenced, ignored, and shut out of important conversations about public education.
Parents like me consistently encounter racist and toxic narratives about how we are less invested in our children’s success than wealthier communities. Though we may not get the media attention of parents who storm school board meetings to ban books, we are doing the work, and always have been.
I am driven by the wisdom of my foremothers, who demonstrated that, collectively, we can and must fight for a world worthy of our dignity, hopes, and dreams.
I’m one of the parent members who make up Lift Every Voice Philly, a Black-led organization committed to driving systems change in Philly schools. My fellow parents and I are united in our belief that we must take collective action to transform our city by fighting for all Philly kids as if they are our own.
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My child is a fifth grader at William C. Bryant Elementary, a K-8 school in Cobbs Creek. Like all the schools associated with our organization, my school is majority Black and low-income. School data show that none of Bryant’s students passed the recent math state tests. But what that data won’t tell you is that Bryant students, like other students in neglected schools, are consistently subjected to classes without full-time teachers — sometimes for an entire year.
In January, fellow Bryant parents and I learned that our school no longer had a nurse after one of our children relayed that they were unable to get routine help for a schoolyard scrape.
This news brought back some awful memories from 2013, when nurses were cut all across the district. In the end, two children — one of whom was a Bryant student — died after experiencing health emergencies, with no nurse on duty. We will never know if a school nurse could have made all the difference.
For the past year, we, as parents — closest to the pain of injustice and disinvestment — have been organizing to build the power we need to chart a new path forward. We channeled our anger and fear into action and expanded our fight to neighboring schools that were also suffering without nurses. We quickly established new parent chapters at Commodore John Barry Elementary, Edward Heston, Alain Locke, and Roosevelt Elementary Schools.
We built community by sharing our stories of how the nurse vacancy crisis was endangering our children. A daughter who was given the wrong medication. A son unable to access medicine all day. Health emergencies that resulted in 911 calls and ambulances as the only course of action.
The absence of school nurses doesn’t just threaten our children, it also traumatizes our families and threatens our livelihood. When we get panicked calls from school, informing us that our children are in ambulances on the way to the hospital, when we are called from work to administer medication, and when we keep our kids home safe with family members, we bear the weight of this failure. Too many of us have had our pay docked and received write-ups at work for needing to leave. Too many of us have received truancy court and Department of Human Services visits, blaming us for our kids’ absences from school when this is a failure of the school system.
We got to work, organizing community dinners, canvassing outside our schools, collecting hundreds of petition signatures, and hosting phone banks to the superintendent’s office at school dismissal.
Our persistence and collective efforts paid off and brought new urgency to this long-standing problem. Even when some of our schools got nurses, it wasn’t enough — we stayed the course to ensure that we kept the focus on all schools, and over time, we’ve watched all our school chapters add daily nurse coverage.
The School District, which typically has dozens of nurse vacancies in its 217 schools, has now turned this shortage around. (According to a district spokesperson, there are only 10 schools with short-term substitute nurses, “however over the past 2 weeks there has been a 98% coverage rate at those schools. Meaning that those schools have been receiving nursing services 4-5 days per week.” The spokesperson added that the number of schools with a short-term substitute nurse is fluid and can fluctuate — if, for example, a district nurse goes on leave.)
Our persistence and collective efforts paid off.
By partnering with Karyn Lynch, the chief of student support services, Kendra McDow, the schools’ chief medical officer, and Shannon Smith, the district’s director of nursing, district staff listened to the urgent needs we put forth and responded to them in a timely manner by overhauling the hiring process and placing temporary nurses in places like Barry, where students have gone years without a regular nurse.
We are happy to celebrate this progress, but we also know that lasting change will require more competitive salaries, additional administrative support for the nurses who currently work in the district, and a clear pipeline for temporary nurses to become permanent.
This is just the beginning. In 2024 we will be expanding to new chapters across Philadelphia and growing our movement to transform the district and the city.
Our work is not done until our city is truly accountable to Black parents who have consistently shown that we have the expertise needed to build a district and city worthy of our children, hopes, and dreams.
Carrera Wilson is a parent of a child at the William C. Bryant Elementary School. She is a member of Lift Every Voice Philly, a Black-led parent organizing group committed to driving systems change in Philly public schools.