OPINION: Letter From Medfield Public Schools Nurse Leader

OPINION...

A Letter to the Medfield Community,

My husband and I have lived and raised our family in Medfield for the past 38 years and like many of you, most of my community activities have revolved around children.

I am on the board of Medfield Youth Outreach, chair of the Medfield Home Committee, on the finance committee for Medfield Cares about Prevention and Suicide Awareness, am a Safe Church Advocate for one of the churches in town and on the Medfield Board of Health. I’m grateful to the town for the wonderful community my children had to grow up in and am committed to the future for all of our children. No one was more surprised than I, that after many rewarding years as a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner at Children’s Hospital, that I would fall in love with school nursing. For the past 24 years I’ve worked at the Dale Street School and am currently the nurse leader for the district.

Despite the challenges of COVID, I continue to love my job but can say that in my 24 years in Medfield Public Schools, the most challenging times have been during the building projects at Blake, Memorial and Medfield High School.

I am so grateful to the current building team and for the multiple opportunities, both personally and professionally with so many different experts in their fields over the past few years to have input into the proposed building project for a new elementary school. Granted, having a window in a nurse’s office may not bring most people to tears, but for me it did!

For those of you that know me, you know that I am probably the least political person there is, but as a medical professional, I have many concerns for our students if the Wheelock site for the new elementary school does not pass. If we must postpone the project (and anyone who has physically spent any time in the building knows the desperate need) and our 4th and 5th graders end up attending school in a building site, it is certainly less than ideal for kids that have spent the past year and half (mostly successfully due to our dedicated teachers and parents) in crisis mode being expected to pivot and change much too often. Visits to the nurse for mental health concerns have increased dramatically over the past 18 months.

With the benefit and hopefully wisdom of age, I must honestly share that many students (not just our students with ADHD and those with other sensory challenges and special needs) do not do well with noise and ever changing schedules of location and times due to construction needs. The focus of administrators, while always well meaning, is forced to be on the issues at hand when it is much better spent on issues pertaining to the teaching, learning and health of our students.

My husband has retired and I’m headed there so I truly get the financial tax impacts of another project in town, but I know in my heart that after many, many, many meetings attended over the past two years, this project which I never actually believed would happen when any of the five principals in my tenure mentioned it (hopefully I never actually laughed out loud), is very much overdue and the children of Medfield deserve it!

So grateful,
Kathy Thompson, Evergreen Way, Medfield