The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

9-year-old girl's death raises nurse staffing concerns

Area schools lost many full-time nurses to budget cuts and layoffs.

Share your condolences for Unique Figgers At legacy.com

Man, 68, drowns at Caesar Creek Lake
5/26/12
Water rescues prompt warning from health officials
5/25/12
Beach Waterpark sued for failure to deliver
5/25/12
Raleigh Trammell’s defense opens in felony trial
5/25/12
UD to move satellite campus to Dublin
5/25/12
> More headlines

By Margo Rutledge Kissell, Staff Writer Updated 1:48 AM Friday, September 23, 2011

DAYTON — Two months before 9-year-old Unique Figgers collapsed at Westwood PreK-8 School and died Tuesday, Dayton Public Schools laid off 10 school nurses — one-third of its nursing staff.

Among them was the full-time nurse at Westwood, which now has one nurse splitting her days between the elementary school and Thurgood Marshall High School.

On Tuesday morning, when Unique collapsed after reportedly telling friends she felt dizzy, the school nurse was at Belmont High School as part of a team performing vision screenings.

Though the cause of death still has not been determined as investigators await test results following Wednesday’s autopsy, the girl’s sudden death has put a spotlight on the nursing staff reductions and sparked concern among some who wonder whether having a school nurse on duty that day might have changed the outcome.

Dayton Police Sgt. Larry Tolpin said the girl, who had asthma and allergies, appeared fine when she left for school that morning and she had breakfast at school.

At 8:55 a.m., she told her teacher she was not feeling well and was sent to the unstaffed nurse’s office.

The girl was on her way there when she collapsed in the hallway and adults came to her aid, said Marianne Urban, director of health services for Dayton Public Schools.

An occupational therapist started CPR after the school secretary had summoned paramedics. Unique was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital, where the coroner’s office said she died at 9:57 a.m.

David Romick, president of the Dayton Education Association, the teachers union that also represents the nurses, said he doesn’t know if anybody could have saved her.

“I think the nursing shortage, as caused by the state budget, is going to play into what happens in schools in a number of ways. Did it in this particular case? I don’t know,” Romick said. “It’s temping to say ‘we told you so,’ but you can’t use a kid’s death to do that when nobody really knows.”

Urban, herself a registered nurse, said she is confident school personnel followed proper protocol. “I’m very pleased with how our staff did react in an emergency situation,” she said.

Dayton Public now has 21 nurses in 30 schools. Ten are full-time at their schools because of the number of medically fragile students they deal with; 11 other nurses have two schools each.

Other staff members have received training on how to respond to life-threatening situations, such as by starting CPR and calling 911, which Urban said was done in this case.

A Dayton Daily News analysis in May found that most districts fall short of student-to-nurse guidelines of one nurse for every 750 students set by the National Association of School Nurses and supported by the Ohio Department of Education.

“We do have a concern registered nurses are being (laid off) from districts and unlicensed people are being put in a situation to have to evaluate whether or not a child is having health issues,” said Martha Bergren, director of research for the National Association of School Nurses.

“We know it takes longer for a layperson to detect that a child is starting to exhibit signs and symptoms of an exacerbation of a health issue.”

Linda Eads, a registered nurse for 40 years who works at Wright Brothers PreK-8 School at Grant, believes the safety of students could be put at risk because there aren’t school nurses on duty certain days of the week.

She doesn’t know whether having a nurse at Westwood when Unique fell ill would have changed the outcome, but she believes it could have helped.

“If a child can die that suddenly at school, maybe that nurse would see the symptoms,” she said.

Eads, who “floats” to other schools to assist children who are injured or ill, said school nurses have to deal with issues such as diabetes, asthma, seizures, food allergies, major psychiatric illnesses, congenital childhood diseases as well as vision and hearing disorders.

Staff writer Doug Page contributed to this report.

Share this article