School district nursing is not just a job but an adventure

Even a nurse will agree that retirement, at the right time, is just what the doctor ordered.

Linda Langston is ending a career that placed her in trauma centers and school clinics. She retires this week as director of health for the Abilene ISD. She has supervised 38 school nurses in the district.

"Helping the nurses when they need help," she said. The buck, or maybe it's the thermometer, stops with her. If parents have care questions at schools, Langston is the next person they can talk with.

Her current group of nurses is relatively young, many with five years' of experience. School nurses with 30 or so years retired, she said, so a new generation has entered to succeed them. The job is attractive to nurses with younger children - the job parallels the school day.

But recently, it was a job that raised blood pressure.

She was in the middle of a pandemic that placed school districts in the middle of promoting health safety and keeping students on a path of learning.

"It was interesting," she said.

A career that included a pandemic

She never envisioned then that she would have to work through a pandemic 12 years after taking her administrative job.

"During COVID, it was crazy. Lots of upset parents, especially during football season when you told a parent their son couldn't play because he either had been exposed or he had COVID himself," she said. "Then as the rules slacked off, people started relaxing."

She had students who found out they had been near someone who tested positive and wanted to be tested immediately. They had to be told that a test so soon would negative; it would take three to five days to exhibit symptoms.

"They were like, Can I test every day?" she said.

"During that first round, everybody was scare to death of COVID," she said "Now, I don't think many people test. They think "everybody I'm around has it.'"

But at least she had experience. Each year before 2020, it was the flu that rattled the district. During January and February, she said, the district could have 400 or more students out weekly.

Masks?

Langston saw the benefits. When wearing masks was required, or, at least "strongly encouraged" as the district stated, students did not get as sick. There was less flu, fewer colds, etc., she said.

Those ailments have returned post-COVID, she said.

On the upside, hand-washing still is good.

"We had hand sanitizer out every place. I think they liked playing with it," she said, laughing.

School is where kids learn about hygiene, she said. Washing hands is key to staying healthy, she believes.

"Any illness, any virus, anything," she said.

Linda's roots are in nursing

An Abilene native, Langston is a 1971 graduate of Abilene High.

She went onto the University of Texas and did here psych training in Austin.

"That was really an experience because you couldn't really tell who were the patients and who were the outside people," she said, laughing. Austin in the 1970s may have been even more interesting than it is today.

Her psych teacher used to say, she said, "Who's to say we're not the crazy ones and their the sane ones?"

She kept her senses and returned to Abilene to attend then-Mary Meek School of Nursing, from which she graduated in 1975.

Langston moved to Waco, where she was an ICU nurse at Hillcrest Baptist Hospital and her husband a bank examiner. His job means they sometimes had to move.

Her next stop was Cook children's hospital in Fort Worth, then it was back to Abilene, where she worked at what today is Hendrick Medical Center. She was in the trauma center, then in surgery.

Her husband was sent back to Fort Worth, and Langston was back at Cook.

The couple returned to Abilene when her husband bought First State Bank in Tuscola. Their three girls graduated from AHS.

Langston has logged 38 years as a hospital nurse.

In 1990, she was contacted about becoming a school nurse. At the time, her daughters were young and working a school-day schedule was perfect, better than her 12-hour shifts at the hospital.

"Lots of days of leaving before they got up and coming home after they went to bed," she said.

So she took the job at Johnston Elementary (now Purcell), working for Principal Charlie Perkins.

She worked there for five years before moving to Lincoln Middle School, where she also stayed for five years.

Langston still worked part time at the hospital, filling in when others were out - weekends, holidays and during the summer. She was in labor and delivery.

"I always thought I might need to go back to the hospital someday," so she stayed connected.

In 2001, she returned to full-time hospital work as a child birth educator, when two daughters entered college. That was the year Linda and Randy Langston, also an Abilene High grad in 1971, divorced. He died in November of mesothelioma.

In 2008, she took her current job as director of health services for the school district. Her office is tucked away the AISD's downtown administration building.

She'll leave it this week.

Nurses still on the front line

Langston said a nursing career is fulfilling, and don't think for a moment that being a school nurse is a breeze.

"When you work in a hospital, you might think school nursing would be so boring. You know, passing out a few Band-Aids. But there are so many kids now with health issues - Type 1 diabetes and asthma - that require a nurse who can manage their illness. And our special needs kids have lots of issues, two feedings throughout the day and trachs we have to suction.

"Some of the nurses that sub for me, they're like, 'Oh my gosh, I never imagined that I would be so busy in a clinic all day.'"

Some campus clinics have 90-100 students a day come in

"In COVID, numbers were even larger," she said. "And the paperwork was overwhelming."

The district each weekday reported data publicly.

She believes a lingering effect of COVID is that students are less enthusiastic about coming to school.

"So many of them just don't come to school any more" and use illness as an excuse, she said.

"They want to go for the littlest thing," she said. "How can you miss 50 days of school and keep up with the work?"

Why now?

"My three girls have been very insistent," Langston said about choosing May 2023 to retire.

"Mom, you need to retire to do something else with your life. You've worked so long."

Her daughters are Lindsay Hardaway, the eldest, Megan Kohler and Jordan Grun. Hardaway, whose husband, Jay, was former Abilene City Council member, and Grun live in Abilene. Kohler lives in Dallas.

She also has 11 grandchildren to spend time with. If vacations are taken even in early August, "I'm back to work," Langston said.

Asked if she was Nurse Mom at home, Langston laughed and said she most often said, "You're fine. You'll be fine."

She was the school nurse at Lincoln when Lindsay was a student. She came in one day, saying she had thrown up.

"I told her, 'You say lay here a few minutes and I'll watch you. She would lay there and she'd be fine, and I'd say, 'You need to go back to class,'" she said.

So, no break with mom being the school nurse.

Will she be Nurse Grandma? She now will have time to figure that out.