School nurse

I am friends with a school nurse and in my state the school nurse has to have their BSN or higher. As far as pay you can either get your salary divided over 9 or 12 months and get paid over the summer. In my community they make less than a "floor" nurse . Yet they are off weekends/Holidays and the ever popular snow days!!!!

I was a school nurse for the local high school for 2 years. I had to leave because the pay wasn't enough for my particular situation. (I happen to be a single mom.) In my particular state, a BSN is not required to be a school nurse. I was paid an hourly rate of around $21/hr for 189 days, 8 hour shifts. The district I worked in is one of the highest paying districts in the state. My paychecks were pro-rated out for the year so I was bringing home about $800 every two weeks. I ended up working PRN at the local hospital every week to make ends meet. Long story short, I got tired real fast.

I would recommend school nursing to anyone who has the financial means to take the job. I enjoyed working with the kids.

Up here in Alberta, Canada, both are employed in School Health Programmes. RN and PN are paid the same as hospital nurses due to the union contracts. The only difference is the school programme nurses don't earn shift premiums.

The jobs aren't that hard to get. I have enough seniority to get one, but there is no way I want to spend my working life in elementary and high schools doing vaccinations.

In our school district in New York most schools have one RN and one LPN. If you work alone in a smaller school you must be an RN although I have seen exceptions. Pay is less but hrs. are great if you have kids and 2 incomes.

Hope this helps.

There is a school nurse specialty forum here at allnurses that you can go to find out more information on school nursing. That should help you out !!

Praiser

i just read this post about school nurses. i was a school nurse for a short time. where i live though school nurses are not hired by the school system. we are hired by the departmnet of health and placed in schools thus being called school community health nurses. you need to be a RN ,BSN is helpful but they are really looking for public health nurses. also we have "cluster nursing". the nurse is assigned a group of school based on the number of students. for example you can be responsible for 4 elementary schools or 2 elementary schools and a middle school or a high school and a middle school. in each school there is a health room tech.. who really just needs to go through the orientation. that person really runs the health room. they are acting under your license and you are supervising them. they do need to pass the med test to administer meds etc.. i was not very comfortable with that situation nor did i like driving all over the county to get to the schools i was assigned to...most of the job was paper and numbers...different interaction on the high school level than the elementary school level. we were paid per hour.. so if there was 1/2 day of school.. we only got paid for those hours not a full day. also if they could not place you during the summer you did not get paid...i did find something better for myself..but as suggested you need to ask the specifics of the school nursing policy where you are looking for a position