Administration anticipates difficulty complying with state regulation.
By: Jill Matthews
The West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional Board of Education accepted a district audit and briefly discussed nursing staff issues for school field trips at its meeting Tuesday.
State regulations require that school districts have a nurse accompany a class on a school trip when at least one student on the trip needs to be medicated, said Jon Cosse, assistant superintendent for pupil personnel services.
Since nurses are the only people who can provide medicine to students and the district has seen an increase in the number of students with medical needs the regulation is going to pose a problem with some of the district’s field trips, said Mr. Cosse.
The district, he said, cannot force its nursing staff to go on overnight field trips and will need to consider ways to address this problem. One way might be to expand the base of substitute nurses the district has on its roster, he said.
Board member Steve Katz questioned why the issue is being raised now when the regulation was implemented about a year ago.
Superintendent Robert Loretan said he could not cite the reason for the lag but said the district has been in compliance on the issue most of the time. He said discussions on how to address the problem and who would be responsible for the cost of bringing a nurse on a field trip need to be held.
In other business, Scott Clelland of Ernst & Young, which conducted the district’s audit, said he was pleased with the audit results and noted that definite improvements have been made in the district in the past year.
The audit determined the district did not properly record all disbursements for student body activities, did not properly report all students receiving transportation, and did not properly report all services provided to students, among other things.
While the district still faces some problems with purchasing, the incidents are isolated and do not represent a systemic problem, said Mr. Clelland. He said some of the problems are management "housekeeping" issues and did not present material problems.