hi everyone, so last week i found out, my daughter rachel school got a new nurse,. so i was like ok, got to met with her, for my daughter rachel diabetes care, so everything was ok, till monday i got a call from her,. asking me to call her back, i did, she did not answer, so about a hour later i got a call, from rachel she was, in tears, saying i never call the nurse back, & telling me that she told, her i keep her to low or high, & i never call her back, & didn’t take good care of her diabetes.lie i always take good care of her diabetes,. that is a lie i call her back 5 times, left message after message, so friday, i got a call from my mom, saying that, (Children’s Services Department) worker had just come to the door and wanted to speak with me, now i worry sick, that they will take her away from me, can they ?.
I can’t believe the nerve of that school nurse!!
Did you call from your cell/smart phone? if you did, you may be able to prove that you’ve called and that nurse is a stinking LIAR and she needs to be fired!!
Hi @Amanda_e,
I am so sorry to hear this. While I disagree with the school nurses response to the situation (I think it would take a couple more times for her to see a pattern forming before making a rash decision) you may or may not understand there are certain situations that from health representatives perspective, can warrant a Children’s service representative to assess the situation- merely a visit. I highly doubt they would take your daughter away for a misunderstanding which could be cleared up with the visit.
I have some experience with this of a different kind. My son, my first child was 15 months old when he pulled the plug from our rice cooker and the boiling hot water poured on part of his little body. I was in the kitchen with him, but I was making dinner and long story short, I learned how tenacious children really are. Never had a problem since, my husband and I have 3 kiddos + one bun in the oven. It was a horrible accident and I felt and still feel terribly guilty about the whole thing. I had some minor PTSD from the whole situation the months following the accident. I had anxiety attacks whenever I had to cook alone with my son at home with me. Fortunately, I have healed from that and so has my son. He has scars but nothing out of the ordinary.
My point, at the hospital, the doctors had to report the incident to children’s services because they didn’t know me from anyone else. Once I spoke with the children’s service representative, it was obvious that this was just an accident and they left me alone. Those reps are trained to see signs of abuse- purposeful abuse. It is scary, I thought they were going to take my son away, they are there to assess the situation and protect the child/children in question. You also need to understand that in most if not all, to the detriment of the children at times, they want to keep kids with their parents. I know this because some of friends of ours are foster parents. Our friends work with Children’s Services a lot.
Try to stay calm and understand that the school nurse probably overestimated the situation. Explaining your side is very important.
You are in my thoughts and prayers.
Busybee
Amanda:
I PM’d you with my mobile phone number. Almost the EXACT same thing happened to my daughter and I at the end of her last school year: school nurse told my daughter I “run her low so I can get a good A1c” and “blew off about a hundred phone calls she made to me.” (I gave her, in writing, my mobile number, work number, daughter’s mobile, daughter’s father’s mobile, adult daughter’s mobile, son-in-law’s mobile.) NONE of us received any calls from her. Turned me into to CSD (Children’s Services Division) stating I was “negligent.” My daughter’s A1c’s have all been under 6.4 without an untoward percentage of time spent low. Daughter’s endo “didn’t want to get into the middle of things” so was NO HELP WHATSOEVER, which made things worse. (She is now my daughter’s ex-endo!) Had CSD checking on my daughter at school, asking her questions like “Do you know the difference between the truth and a lie? Do you know the difference between good touching and bad touching?” My daughter developed PTSD over her anxiety that she would end up in a foster home and is still in counseling. Me, pretty much the same. After several months of crawling up my butt with a microscope, CSD cut us loose. Ever since this incident, my daughter’s public school has fought me tooth and nail on EVERYTHING Type-1-related. Principal took her syringes and tried to take her insulin vial from her one day. She refused to hand over her insulin, saying something to the effect of “You will NOT take my insulin. It is my life support. If you try to take it from me, I will call the police and tell them that you assaulted me.” It still upsets me to think about this traumatic time. What the eff is up with these two school nurses? I still, after months of trying to figure out how all this came about, am at a loss for an explanation. Please call me and I can be more specific about what I did to get through this horrible time.
And, (if anyone is thinking of defending the school nurse with the “mandatory reporting” explanation), with all due respect, save it. As a physician, I myself am a mandatory reporter. I make damn sure I know the situation before I file a mandatory report with CSD, Human Services, Law Enforcement, etc. I know only too well the damage a false claim can cause.
just reading this, make me cry, she my baby sister,.
This would be enough to provoke me to violence.
i think, i will go, old-west on them,.
Is there anyway before the school year parents who have children with diabetes can have a meeting with the school nurse and bring along with their children’s blood glucose logs particularly if the nurse doesn’t have a history of how the child’s BG’s are managed. In this way the nurse has something to compare the child’s BG history with.
It seems a bit reckless for a school nurse to respond in such an extreme manner if she doesn’t have a history of the child’s blood glucose levels.
I would think if the child was low the nurse would know how to manage that.
If you feel you need it, I suggest you contact the ADA legal team for support.
This is the web site.
As soon as a child is dx’d with T1D, a mandatory meeting is held with school personnel, including the school nurse, during which time everything is reviewed, physician’s orders are clarified, and a 504 Plan is instituted. We did all this. So did Amanda.
It didn’t matter…
mom, by the time, you see this you might, have already call rose, if not do it today or as-soon, as you can,.
i 
Rachel, yea she my sister,.
@jojeegirl many schools refuse to meet before the beginning of the school year. My daughter’s 504 meeting usually took place 6-10 days into the school year. Even an excellent 504 plan doesn’t guarantee there will be no problems. Some school nurses seem to have little knowledge of the reality of T1. Others may have had students under their care, but for whatever reason, they become self appointed experts. Either situation becomes extremely stressful for the parents, & often the child as well.
School nurses may have a responsibility to report, but they also have a duty to be relatively certain of their claims before traumatizing a family this way.
I would contact the ADA immediately.
I am so sorry if I disrespected you by what I said, I truly didn’t mean to hurt or downplay your experience. I respect and value your opinions and thoughts, I am sorry if I disrespected you.
I don’t agree at all with the school nurses reaction. You would think with all the CPS backlog in most states, CPS would cut their losses and move on. I’m so sorry for what you endured with your daughter and her school. Truly inappropriate and unwarranted esp with all the mounting evidence in your favor. My husband is an EMT and he has had to report potentially abusive situations to CPS, that is the extent to my experience with it, that and my son’s accident. I hear his perspective but honestly, my husband isn’t a damn nosy nurse who doesn’t know his @$$ from his elbow.
I have heard more problems about school nurses diabetic related or not. What is it with them? They have the biggest inferiority complexes and go looking for trouble. I have had many run ins with general nurses in hospitals that don’t know squat about diabetes management (who think that they know more than me), unless they have extensive personal experience. Just the other day I had to explain to nurse how I won’t let the hospital manage my insulin intake for the delivery of my baby. She looked at me like I was nuts. I was extremely forceful about it that I will do it myself with my pump.
You and your daughter know more about her diabetes management than the school nurse, school, or anyone for that matter.
Sometimes our protective services go overboard and waste the resources given to their management. What really fries my bacon is that I’m sure at the same time you were getting raked over the coals, some parent, probably at your daughters school is being neglectful and abusive on purpose.
busybee, no offense taken, no apology needed. Just thinking about those few traumatic months and the feelings of helplessness and fear my daughter (and to a lesser extent, myself) experienced just brings it all back up and makes me feel victimized and violent all over again (thank you, Sam, for the validation). While I was typing that last paragraph, I was concerned that you would feel like it was directed personally at you, and I didn’t mean for it to be! I guess I was feeling a little defensive because on another Forum someone replied to Amanda with what I’m sure was a well-meaning mini-lecture about Mandatory Reporting. The main thing that sticks in my craw about the whole Mandatory Reporting angle is that no one even bothered to actually speak with me or with Amanda to get the facts before they called out the CSD Squad. I’ve never “turned someone in” before I made sure I gathered the facts and ran it by my colleague to try to insure that I wasn’t reading something into the situation that wasn’t really there. Doing this took less than an hour, during which time no one was in imminent danger.
Glad all is good. Thank you. 
I couldn’t agree with you more! An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure, esp when it comes to knowing all the facts with reporting anything. Its better for all parties involved.
Again, I am so sorry for crap you and your daughter were put through, what a freakin’ mess.
just reading everything on this, make me cry,.
i have a friend who works, in cps, & he says, the backlog in my state is bad,
a lot of it, is just stuff like this, that they don’t need,.
Rose, I’m going to save this and use it (completely anonymously, of course) the next time I have sit through someone’s rhapsodic paean to the S-K school system.
Amanda, we had the same thing happen to us to, you can email me, or text me if you want to, i will be happy to help you to,.
Thank you David! There is power in knowledge, power to effect change…