Beaufort County schools are short on nurses, teaching assistants. What’s being done?
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Beaufort County School District has earmarked $1.1 million in state and federal funds to support, hire and retain school nurses — but $992,755 of that money hasn’t been used.
Instead, the district has a shortage of nurses to handle contact tracing, quarantines and responsibilities that predate the pandemic.
According to spokesperson Candace Bruder, the district currently has nine vacant nurse positions.
Three of those vacancies are school nurse positions at Okatie Elementary, Bluffton High and Hilton Head Island Early Childhood Center; two are student service positions for nurses tracking COVID-19; four are “floater” nurse positions intended to fill in for school nurses.
Superintendent Frank Rodriguez says the vacancies are due to a “supply issue.”
“I think one of the challenges we have is in finding nurses,” he said at an Oct. 19 school board meeting. “Hospitals are having the issue; we’re having the issue, as well.”
Bruder said the district is planning to conduct “a comprehensive salary and compensation study that will include all employees,” and has requested contractors for the study.
Any changes to salary and benefits will be based on that study, she said; similar studies have taken between two and four months to complete.
The school district has had similar issues staffing paraprofessionals, also known as teacher assistants or aides. Now, instead of hiring internally, the district is “outsourcing the vacancies” to ESS, a national company that handles substitute teacher hiring for Beaufort County School District and more than 750 other school districts.
Bruder said the new hiring process for paraprofessionals will not affect current employees.
What about federal funding?
The school district has set aside money from two rounds of federal COVID relief funding to alleviate the shortage, making up $1.1 million of the $88 million it’s been approved to use.
School districts submit proposals to the government on how they’ll spend COVID relief funds. Once they’re approved, they have several years to spend the money and receive reimbursements from the federal fund.
In January, Beaufort County School District marked $418,380 of its $22 million ESSER 2 funding to “provide additional nurses” to look over students and perform contact tracing.
The school district received that money in February, but as of Oct. 1, only $25,625 has been spent. The ESSER II funds, which are sent to the school district as a refund after the money is spent, will expire in September 2022.
The district set aside another $600,000 from its $51 million American Rescue Plan Act award to hire nurses. The district’s proposal on how to use that money was approved earlier this month, and the funds will expire in September 2024; none of the nursing money has been spent yet.
The district has already spent the full $93,929 it earmarked in July 2020 for “extra duty salary and benefits” to nurses conducting contact tracing. That money, which came from the district’s $3.6 million Coronavirus Relief Fund award from the S.C. Department of Education, expired in September.