A school nurse’s office in Centre County, Pennsylvania, seen on August 15, 2016. Abby Drey/Centre Daily Times via AP
By Chip Brownlee, The Trace, August 15, 2023
Picture a school nurse’s office: walls adorned with cheery posters about handwashing, a first-aid bed for the occasional stomach ache, a neat row of bandages for a scraped knee. Maybe a Kleenex box on a desk next to a stack of coveted hall passes. It’s a scene full of soft, comfortable textures — but for Robin Cogan, a school nurse in Camden, New Jersey, the typical nurse’s office is missing a necessity.
In Cogan’s own office, she maintains a supply of locks, each with a braided steel cable stretching a little over a foot. They’re for guns.
Cogan would like to see gun locks become an essential element in the school nurse toolkit, alongside emergency inhalers and epi-pens. School nurses are charged with keeping students safe and healthy, but they have largely been left out of gun violence prevention efforts, even as shootings are increasingly treated as a public health issue. They may be uniquely positioned to bolster gun violence prevention through care, education, and intervention.
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