WILDOMAR: Longtime school nurse wins award

Cathy McIntyre has seen increased chronic health problems, mental illness

By RANI GUPTA - Staff Writer | Friday, August 8, 2008 8:47 PM PDT ∞

One morning, a kindergartner walks into the nurse's office at Wildomar Elementary, blinking repeatedly and complaining that it feels like he has dust in his eye.

Nurse Cathy McIntyre peers into his eyes with a light. She doesn't see anything.

McIntyre asks about his glasses ---- he has ordered them but hasn't received them yet ---- and about his parents.

"Daddy's English-speaking and Mommy's not?" she asked. The boy confirms that.

"I'm going to give Mommy a call," McIntyre says.

She explains later that the blinking could be a sign of Tourette's syndrome, a neurological disorder marked by physical or vocal tics.

"It's something you want to rule out," she said.

For nearly two decades, McIntyre, 61, has been helping students deal with illness, injury and mental anguish. Recently, the San Bernardino-Riverside School Nurses Organization recognized her as the top school nurse in the two counties.

"She's very knowledgeable about children and types of illnesses," said Paula Horton, a health clerk who works with McIntyre at Wildomar Elementary. "She can tell a lot of things, like allergies versus pinkeye."

McIntyre said she has gained that knowledge from working as a nurse for 37 years, 19 of them as a school nurse. Not long after moving from Arizona to Hemet, she gave up the unpredictability of hospital shifts to have more time with her four children and started working in the schools.

Her first school nursing job was in the San Jacinto Unified School District, where she was the only nurse for seven schools. McIntyre then took a job in Temecula as the nurse for three elementaries and a middle school before later moving full time to Chaparral High.

Last year, she accepted an early retirement package offered by the Temecula school district. But it didn't take her long to realize that she wasn't ready to stop working yet.

She applied for a job in the Lake Elsinore Unified School District, and since September has been working as the nurse for Wildomar Elementary, William Collier Elementary and David A. Brown Middle School. Now, she plans to work until she can't any longer.

"It's a job where you never dread going to work," she said. "I love my job. I'm very, very blessed."

A big part of McIntyre's job is staying in touch with parents to remind them to schedule doctor appointments or order eyeglasses. McIntyre puts families without vision coverage in contact with charitable groups that provide glasses.

Families typically need four or five phone calls home and two or three letters before their child will show up with glasses, she said.

"Parents have a big job," she said. "I raised four kids. Everything you do is to put food on the table, gas in the tank. ... Sometimes you just need a few reminders."

McIntyre has seen big changes over the years, including an increased emphasis on the importance of nurses. When she started in school nursing, it wasn't uncommon for a single nurse to handle an entire district.

Because of federal laws requiring special education students to be placed in traditional schools whenever possible, McIntyre said it has become more common for nurses such as herself to deal with students with catheters or tracheostomies.

McIntyre said she's also noticed an increase in students with chronic health problems, such as diabetes, and mental illness, such as depression or self-mutilation, especially at the high school level.

Many parents, she said, are giving their kids "things instead of giving them time." Some of those children show up repeatedly with headaches or stomachaches and McIntyre said she works to find the underlying problem.

"One of the most important things I've learned is that all behavior has meaning," she said. "When you're coming in the health office all the time, it's like, 'What is going on here?'"

McIntyre said she has "a real instinct for identifying depressed kids" and has been able to get help for students with mental health issues.

But she said dealing with students' problems is not always easy, especially when there are signs of abuse. She and her husband took in one student for three months not long after he reported that his father struck him, bruising his torso. The boy graduated from high school and moved in with his grandparents, McIntyre said.

In San Jacinto, she said, she treated a boy with cerebral palsy who came to school in dirty clothes and gray patches on his skin where his family hadn't washed him. The teachers, she said, took the time to dress him in new clothes every morning.

But when McIntyre found him bruised on one side of his body, she called child protective services and the father was eventually jailed. The boy moved away.

"I'll never know what happened to him, but I still think about him," McIntyre said. "It's one of those things that haunt me."

Those cases are among the toughest, she said.

"You do what you can, and you have to accept that there's some of them where you can't change the situation they're in," McIntyre said.

Contact staff writer Rani Gupta at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2625, or rgupta@californian.com.