Whether remote or hybrid, Ann Lanney is working to keep Concord students healthy this year, amid many new challenges.
Lanney is a school nurse at Rundlett Middle School, where she has worked since 2002. Before becoming a school nurse, she worked in maternity and neo-natal intensive care in Boston and Manchester.
This year, Lanney is at the center of COVID-19 prevention at Concord’s middle school. The fall semester brought with it many new responsibilities for school nurses, including coordinating COVID-19 screenings, assessing students with virus symptoms, keeping track of quarantines and contact tracing after positive cases.
“I think being a school nurse has always been being a public health nurse to a greater or lesser extent. This year, it’s to a greater extent,” Lanney said. “Our role is to educate people, to set protocols in place, in order to keep people as safe as possible under the circumstances.”
In addition to her full-time school nurse job, Lanney stepped into a new role in June as school nurse coordinator for the district. She communicates regularly with the district’s other nurses and district administrators to make sure everything is running smoothly with COVID-19 protocol.
“Ann is a true Jill-of-all-trades, helping students who visit her for a myriad of reasons,” wrote Rundlett school counselors Kate Weeks, Lori Trefethen and Lindsey Herbert, who nominated Lanney to be recognized as a Hometown Hero. “She is a smart, calm, consistent figure that staff and students seek out for health support. Since March, Ann has taken on a great responsibility with sharing information and working with students, staff, and families, to keep us all as safe as possible during these uncharted times.”
As new information about COVID-19 emerged throughout the spring and summer, Lanney learned everything she could about the virus from webinars, health alert networks and pamphlets from DHHS. Over the summer, she was on the school reopening committee, helping the district and Rundlett administrators to come up with protocols. She made sure her building got cleaning supplies and PPE like face masks and shields. She also taught educational assistants how to properly use PPE.
When the school is in a hybrid model, Lanney is responsible for overseeing health screenings, assessing students and sending them home when they have symptoms of COVID-19. She said sending students home is difficult because it is counterintuitive to her usual goal, which is to get them feeling better and learning again.
“It’s hard on the nurses, because our usual role is to try to get children back to the classroom to access their education,” Lanney said. “Everyone thinks we’re there for emergencies, we’re there to put band-aids on, but our actual role is to get kids to access their education.”
Since New Hampshire’s influx of cases in November, Lanney has also taken on contact tracing at Rundlett. She said one of her biggest challenges this year has been COVID-19 transmission occurring outside the district, through extracurricular activities or social interactions that impact her students.
Despite the additional efforts this year, Lanney stressed the fact that she does not see herself as a hero, just a hard-working member of a team of school nurses using the best available science to reduce spread and keep people safe.
“It’s been hard work and I’ve been doing it alongside all the nurses in our district,” Lanney said. “We support each other, we all have different strengths and I think we have been able to be successful and survive this experience with the support of one another.”