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Connect Canyons
Learning is about making connections, and we invite you to learn and connect with us. Connect Canyons is a show about what we teach in Canyons District, how we teach, and why. We get up close and personal with some of the people who make our schools great: students, teachers, principals, parents, and more. We meet national experts, too. And we spotlight the “connection makers” — personalities, programs and prospects — we find compelling and inspiring.
Connect Canyons
Episode 106: Canyons Schools Pilot Test Telehealth as One Solution to Student Absenteeism
All across the nation, schools are struggling with what is called chronic absenteeism. Last year, 32 percent of Canyon School District students were chronically absent — meaning they missed more than 10 percent of the school year. The problem became prevalent following the pandemic, and Canyons is working to help keep our students learning, interacting with peers, and taking full advantage of everything the classroom has to offer.
In the latest episode of Connect Canyons, we learn about one of the many ways Canyons works to help students, their families, and Canyons employees alike determine whether a cough is due to dry air or something more serious. Canyons Nursing Specialist Jen Gerrard, shares details about how Canyons is one of the first in the state to pilot a new Telehealth program.
“Adding the Telehealth just gives us greater access,” says Gerrard. “It removes so many barriers. It removes the barrier of time, so students aren't missing time from school, parents aren't missing time from work. It removes transportation barriers. Somebody who doesn't have a car has a real difficult time picking up their student and then also getting them to a doctor. That can be a real challenge for some families.”
Episode Chapters
00:57 Telehealth Program Overview
Our expert tells us how Canyons came to be one of the first in the state to pilot the telehealth program at 17 schools with the help of Intermountain Health.
02:20 How Telehealth Works
We learn how the telehealth program works from the moment a student feels unwell to speaking with a nurse, and how parents are looped in.
06:42 Impact and Expansion of Telehealth
How the telehealth program has already helped Canyons students and employees and what the future could look like.
11:19 Additional Health Programs
Gerrard explains other measures in place to help students and employees with a variety of health concerns.
Welcome to Connect Canyons, a podcast sponsored by Canyons School District. This is a show about what we teach, how we teach and why we get up close and personal with some of the people who make our schools great Students, teachers, principals, parents and more. We meet national experts too. Learning is about making connections, so connect with us.
Speaker 2:All across the nation, schools are struggling with what is being called chronic absenteeism. In the 2023-24 school year, 32% of Canyon School District students were chronically absent, meaning they missed more than 10% of the school year. The problem became prevalent following the pandemic, and Canyons is working to help keep our students learning and in the classroom. Welcome to Connect Canyons. I'm your host, frances. Cook Canyon School District is pilot testing a school-based telehealth program at 17 of our schools with the help of Intermountain Health. Joining me today to tell us about this new program is Canyon's nursing specialist, jen Gerard. Thanks for joining us, jen Hi, thanks for having me Now. The telehealth program is for both students and employees alike. Tell me, how did this all come about?
Speaker 3:I listened to a presentation from the lead nurse in Wasatch School District, and she talked all about their tele. I reached out to Intermountain Health and we scheduled a meeting with the admin and Intermountain Health the people that run the telehealth program and so they provided us with information and everybody was very excited about the opportunity, and so we decided to pilot it in a handful of our schools via our school nurses.
Speaker 2:That's really great, so we're one of the first in the state to have this program. It sounds like.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So Intermountain they started reaching out to lead nurses pretty heavily after a couple of other people demonstrated some interest, and so there's a handful of districts that are piloting it this year at the same time that we are.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So the reason students miss school can be widely varying. You know, headaches, their stomach hurts, you name it. What are some of the health concerns that the telehealth program can help students and employees with? That's a good question.
Speaker 3:So there's so many different reasons that students will come down to the health room. Like you said headaches, stomach aches sometimes it's somatization of other anxieties or stressors that are going on in their lives. The Intermountain Health School-Based Telehealth Program is really designed to kind of replace what we would typically go to urgent care for. So if somebody comes down and they have a sore throat and a fever, we have point-of-care testing on site with each of our telehealth equipment kits and that's part of the assessment that the nurse will start with. They might do a strep test. If the student is complaining that their ears are hurting, then the nurse will have a look at the ears and assess what's going on, see if they have a temperature. If they have indications that there could be an infection going on in that ear, then they can connect with telehealth after receiving parent consent and basically get them treated almost on the spot. For the ear infection example, they would look at the ear, determine that telehealth would be warranted, reach out to the parent for consent. Parent can then join the call, which has been really great. They can still be there, live seeing the whole visit go down and at that point the provider can look at the ears right there on the spot too. Using the equipment that we have in our kits, they can visualize that whole eardrum and make a determination and a diagnosis From there.
Speaker 3:If antibiotics are prescribed, or if there's any prescriptions, then they would send those to the pharmacy of choice that the parent puts in their consent form. Parent can pick up the student at the end of the school day because if they're well enough to stay at school for the rest of the day they can still stay. We might give them a little bit of over-the-counter medication to help them feel better. If the parent would like us to do that, parent can pick the student up, pick the antibiotic up head home, give them their first dose. They're back at school the next day. So zero downtime Strep infections I know I mentioned that already, but that's a little bit different just because there is a period of contagion and so we would still. We can pick up the antibiotics, start the antibiotics and once they've been on antibiotics for 12 hours they can return to school. So typically they're back the next day.
Speaker 2:You know, growing up in a time where you would just have to call or show up at the doctor's office and just wait in the waiting room for hours on end, and then you have not only the student missing school, but parents are having to miss work.
Speaker 3:It's just so incredible to me to think that it's just a virtual and the employees that use it have also really loved it because it's been just that convenient. They're not waiting in a health room, they're in a doctor's office waiting room, they're staying in the health room with the nurse. We have a designated provider for telehealth, for school-based telehealth, and so we wait like 7 to 15 minutes max. If the wait's going to be longer than that, they'll call us and have us schedule a time so that we can kind of better anticipate and then that way it might make sense to have the student return to class or have them wait with us, depending on how they're feeling. But so far we haven't waited more than 15 minutes for any of our appointments, so we just, by the time we get the intake on, we've got somebody there to respond pretty quickly, so it's been really convenient, I imagine it goes even beyond the convenience of it.
Speaker 2:That's always nice for us to be able to, you know, turn things around that quickly. But then, as you've said in the past, students can't learn if they don't feel well, if they're not healthy. And even for the teachers, they'd much rather have a couple minutes, half hour downtime versus days on end.
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely. Beyond convenience, I mean, it just improves access. It makes it just so easy for parents to get in for an appointment without having to figure out where their insurance is accepted. We already have a list of all that information so we can determine pretty quickly if their insurance is accepted in Connect Care and it just it's that quick appointment that minimizes downtime for the student, minimizes their disruption to instruction in the classroom and it minimizes the parent's downtime at work. Our telehealth provider is amazing and she will allow us to get on the call first and then we'll send the invite to the parent so the parent can join right there in that moment when the provider is already on the call, which is so kind and it's just it's really minimizing downtime for everybody involved.
Speaker 2:Not having to wait with the hold music playing the Muzak. We've had this program in place since September of last year at 17 of our schools. We're not out at all of them yet, but have you already seen an impact from it?
Speaker 3:We have From September to December. Over those first few months in the fall we had 39 total visits. Out of those 39 visits, 27 of those missed zero days of school, so they didn't need to go home and they were able to return to school the next day. The handful of people that have missed time off have been either they've had a strep infection and they're contagious, so they need to miss a little bit of time. But we've had six that have missed less than half a day, three that have missed one day and only three that have missed more than one day. So historically, as a school nurse working in a higher needs community, I mean I've had students where I've looked at the ears, when they've complained of ear pain and I'm like I really think you need to see a provider. This may be infected and those students don't return for three or four days, which is a crazy amount of time and it's completely unnecessary.
Speaker 2:So it seems to be working, you know, just in roughly half of our schools. Is there a plan to potentially put it out at all schools?
Speaker 3:I would love that. I haven't talked with leadership yet about expanding the program because we've been focused on just collecting some data to see how beneficial the need is. I think that we still certainly aren't reaching everyone. We still have a lot of people that forget that we have it. Most of the visits that we see are the ones that have a nurse there full time and then we have a handful of nurses that cover more than one school that we're just testing to see how feasible it is. That gets a little bit trickier because if the nurse isn't in that building then it's just kind of an oversight and they may call the parent and the parent will pick them up.
Speaker 2:Now for the schools that do have the program in place. Do families need to sign up for it, or is it just as simple as a kiddo's not feeling so well and they walk into the front office and say, hey, I don't feel well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so both. We have our registration and consent available on our CSD website. It's on the nursing service page. There's telehealth consents in a handful of different languages available. Parents can go on there anytime and complete one and that's basically opting in for the program If we were to. Even if they don't have a need at that moment, they can do the consent and it's good for 12 months with Intermountain essentially. So each time we would do a visit within that 12 month period that we have consent for, we would still call and get a verbal consent from the parent too. We have a number of parents that went ahead and completed it straight away as soon as we pushed out our parent square, but then a lot of times it's the need arises. We reach out to the family, we direct them to that consent form and they complete it at that time and then we get them on with a provider.
Speaker 2:I'd like to go back when, at the very beginning, you were talking about how you had heard about it in another district. What is it about absenteeism, about telehealth, that just made you say we need to be doing this? Why is this important for our students and for our employees?
Speaker 3:Well, for me I mean nurses. We're here as medical professionals and so we help students manage all sorts of different conditions, chronic and acute. But our goal is really the same as all the other educators we want students to be in school, in their classrooms, learning with their peers, and so the more that we can keep kids at school when they're healthy enough to do so, the better off they're going to be, and they need to be healthy to learn. So adding the telehealth just gives us greater access and it removes so many barriers. It removes the barrier of time, so students aren't missing time from school, Parents aren't missing time from work. It removes transportation barriers.
Speaker 3:Somebody who doesn't have a car has a real difficult time picking up their student and then also getting them to a doctor. That can be a real challenge for some families. We have the financial barriers that get in the way too. A ConnectCare visit, if you paid out of pocket, is $69. They accept most insurance. Their list is pretty broad. Even insurance networks that wouldn't traditionally be accepted by Intermountain Health or be on an Intermountain plan are accepted by ConnectCare. It's a pretty big list. And then, if you are worried or concerned that you're not going to have the. If you don't have insurance and you don't have the ability to pay the $69 fee, then we do have financial assistance that's available upon qualifying for that. We have lots of options, but that's still one more barrier. It's just the ability to pay for a visit is another challenge that gets in the way for some families.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and that's really good to know that it's not just if you're covered under Intermountain. They're also taking a number of other insurance programs. This is one of many programs that we have in place when it comes to caring for our students and employees, when it comes to their health. What are some of the other things that we have in place to help them out during the day.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so in regard to telehealth, so I'll just start there because we're already talking about it. But with the implementation of the telehealth pilot, we also really vamped up our standing orders, and standing orders are for different medications, point of care, testing, and so it's given our nurses a lot more resources to help students stay at school and be able to keep learning and feel better. When they're having something minor, such as a bug bite, that they just can't leave alone, it's so itchy. We've got hydrocortisone cream now that the nurse can apply to that to help them feel better right there in the moment and they can return to class and focus. We have ibuprofen, tylenol, things like that, if it's after an assessment with the nurse, if that's needed. But additionally, like point of care testing has been a huge game changer too, because you know we've ran a handful of strep tests that have come back negative and that helps us rule something out, so then we can go back to. Well, your sore throat could be related to congestion or a cold or something else that you've got going on, but it helps us determine whether or not a student really needs to go home or not.
Speaker 3:Additionally, our nursing team has we started doing vaccines a couple of years ago we partnered with Utah Department of Health the Vaccine for Children program and we were able to vaccinate many students and so we're helping maintain compliance there, which is also keeping kids in school, because per legislation, if they're not in compliance with their vaccines by a certain number of days after enrolling, then they really should be excluded from school until they get their vaccines in compliance. We offer vaccine clinics a handful of times throughout the year, almost monthly. Lately we have another one coming up in March, on March 12th, from 3 to 6 pm, and that's going to be another opportunity to just help those kids get what they need and keep them protected and keep them in school.
Speaker 2:That's great. If parents or, you know, even our employees have questions or want to see what all we have is there, where can they go to find more information on what the systems we have in place?
Speaker 3:They can reach out to the school nurse that's assigned to their building. They're always a great resource. They can answer lots of questions. They're always welcome to reach out to me. They can call me, they can email me. I'm happy to answer questions.
Speaker 2:It's really great to hear all of the steps that we have in place to not only keep our students healthy and things, but, like we talked about, make it convenient for the student and the parent and keep our kiddos in class. You know, like we said, they can't learn if they're not healthy and happy, and thank you for all the work that you do to make sure that they are. Thank you, and thank you for listening. If there's a topic you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, send us an email to communications at canyonsdistrictorg.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to this episode of Connect Canyons. Connect with us on Twitter, facebook or Instagram at Canyons District or on our website, canyonsdistrictorg.
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