Nurse Substitute

[RABBY]

I am a RN and have worked 12 years in a hospital setting until I resigned from my job two weeks ago. I had been feeling real burn out and not want to return to work for a while but I was just recently offered a nurse substitute position at a local school district. My question is how often will I be working? I really don't want to work very much. The school district consists of 1 high school, 2 junior highs, and about 5 elementary schools. Also, do they call you the morning of or night before? Thanks for any info.

[RN3339]

I don't know how much this will help, but I have a friend that did this for one school year. It was all over the board. Sometimes she would know she was working certain days to cover days off, etc. Sometimes she was called the night before, sometimes morning of depending on when someone called out sick. It was really hard to predict. It is similar to a substitute teacher. She did have the option to decline, but that was frowned upon. It was too unpredictable for her so she only did it the one year. I would ask the person hiring you to outline more information about the requirements of the position and ask how many hours this position usually averages based on the previous two or three school years, etc.

Again, not sure how helpful that was, but good luck to you :-)

[abc123RN]

My experience as a sub school nurse was the call can come at anytime. Sometimes I knew days ahead of time, sometimes that call would come early in the morning I was needed to cover. Several times I would get a call in the middle of the day if one of the nurses had a family emergency or got sick themselves. I worked like that for one school year and was starting my second year when I got a call last fall to cover one school for the rest of that week, that turned into the next month of covering the same school. Then we got the word that nurse wasn't going to return. So I basically said yes to subbing in one school until the job was posted as open, applied and got the full time position. I only said no to working once as a sub, I was down with the flu myself. Always answering the phone and saying yes to working was the smartest thing I have ever done. I am now in one of my favorite schools I have ever worked in and loving my job everyday!

[rbytsdy]

Does the district have other nurse subs? If you are the only sub, you'd probably get called quite a bit. If there are other subs, they might get called first. Can you set up certain days they can call? For instance, tell them you are only available on Tuesday and Thursdays? We have a sub that works in a doctor's office so she is only available 2 days a week.

[100kids, BSN, RN]

Subbing is a great way to get in to a school you may want to work in or to just see if this might be a job you will like. School Nurse subs are hard to find in my area so I take few days off but in a larger district you could probably work 1-2 days/week if you wanted. The joy of being a sub is you can always decide not to pick up a day. Good luck.

[Nurse ABC]

In our district we have 30+ schools and I don't know how many subs but it's never enough. When I subbed, I could go online and days i knew there was a day I didn't want to work I could check unavailable so I wouldn't be bothered. Otherwise, like others said, you can get called anytime. If if was something for the future it was usually the nurse director who would call and see if I was available. I always tried to accomodate but I never felt bad for saying no. That's the perk of being a sub. I found it was usually feast or famine. I was either getting called almost every day or a few weeks would go by with nothing. You just never know.