Nashoba Tech Nurses Pivot Amid Pandemic

WESTFORD, MA — The job of a school nurse is a busy one, with at least six kids visiting the nurse's office at any given time for scrapes, to take medication or just to get through a panic attack. But when the pandemic hit last March, like nearly everyone else, the school nurses had to pivot.

"The biggest difference is there aren’t six kids in here right now," said Pat Trahman, one of two school nurses at Nashoba Valley Technical High School.

While students can be in the school during their technical week, academic classes are being taught remotely, so only about half of the student body is in the school at any time.

“We’ve just pivoted,” Kate Gamache, the other school nurse, said.

The two have had to learn the latest science in connection with the virus and have developed closer relationships with boards of health in the eight towns that make up Nashoba Tech’s district — Ayer, Chelmsford, Groton, Littleton, Pepperell, Shirley, Townsend and Westford — to keep up to date on guidelines in those communities.

“The whole job has changed,” Trahman said. “We have a whole other room now that serves as a waiting room for people who appear to have COVID symptoms.”

Trahman said Nashoba Tech, unlike several other area schools, hasn’t had any in-school transmissions of COVID-19. Compare that with Westford School Districts, which between Feb. 4 and Feb. 10, according to the latest data available from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, reported three cases of students who tested positive for the virus with district building access within seven days of the positive case report.

There have been several members of the school community who have contracted the virus were infected outside of school, but those have been instructed to quarantine as per federal and state guidelines, according to the school.

Gamache keeps a spreadsheet to track every student who has been tested that she shares with members of the school’s COVID-19 response team.

“We have to make sure that the students who have been quarantined still are able to access their teachers,” Gamache said.

“And it’s not just the students,” she added. “We’re taking care of the staff, too. The staff have a lot of questions about COVID, so we provide education for them, too.”

A common question relates to how to find and execute coronavirus testing.

“We’ve also had a lot of calls from families trying to find testing sites,” Gamache said. “So we’ve been helping them navigate that as well.”

Trahman and Gamache still deal with the usual issues; they provide medications to students who need them, only now they deliver them to the students, instead of the students coming to the health office to get them, cutting down on the number of people walking the halls at any one time.

And there are still students who suffer anxiety or panic attacks.

“We go scoop them up and take them for a walk so they can de-stress,” Trahman said. “And we still have the cuts and scrapes, though not at the level we used to, but we still have to take care of them.”

The changes seem to be the new normal for both the school and the students at Nashoba Valley Tech. But the nurses say they miss the interaction they had with students.

“We miss the kids,” Gamache said.

“That’s why we get into this job — we love the kids,” Trahman said. “They make you laugh and cry, and we just miss them.”