CCSD a step closer to letting students carry emergency medications

A pending change to a Clark County School District regulations will allow the youngest students with asthma, diabetes and allergies that trigger life-threatening anaphylaxis to carry and self-administer the medications they need in an emergency.

A district rule currently limits the ability to carry emergency medications for these conditions to students in middle or high school. State law outlining how asthmatic, diabetic and allergic students may carry emergency medications, however, does not specify what grade levels of students can give themselves their medicines.

The local change, part of a wide-ranging cleanup of CCSD’s student health and welfare regulation, will apply to students in preschool through fifth grade.

The school board unanimously approved the first reading of the amendments Thursday with no discussion. The item will come back before the board in September for a final vote to make the changes official.

The ability for elementary schoolers to carry their emergency medication would have made Barbara Vesci feel better when her daughter, Cayden, was younger.

Cayden was diagnosed with asthma when she was about 7 or 8. The inhaler that Cayden, who is now a sophomore at Green Valley High School, needed when she had an asthma attack was stored in the front office when she was in elementary school.

Vesci said her daughter’s asthma was relatively mild. But she’s used her inhaler more as she’s gotten older and been more active in school and gym class. Vesci makes sure Cayden always has her inhaler available.

If nothing else, having an inhaler within arm’s reach can provide peace of mind, she said.

“My child doesn’t have severe asthma, but still in all she has asthma,” Vesci said. “For especially those who have severe asthma, it would be so much better if they could have it on them, because that can be scary for a child — it could be scary for their parents — to not have immediate access to their inhaler.”

The regulation updates say that elementary students may not self-administer any medication except for emergency asthma, anaphylaxis and diabetes treatments. In addition to giving themselves emergency medication, students in sixth grade and up were already also cleared to give themselves noncontrolled substances and over-the-counter medications as long as the medicine is properly labeled and they can provide written parental authorization.

For emergency medicine — which may include rescue inhalers to open airways, glucagon kits for low blood sugar, and injectable epinephrine, or EpiPens, for severe allergic reactions leading to anaphylactic shock — parents must submit a written request for their child to carry and self-administer their medication and provide a signed treatment plan or order from a prescribing health care provider. Medications must have detailed labels.

Monica Cortez, chief of CCSD’s student services division, gave the school board a brief rundown of the proposed changes to the student health and welfare regulation. Other highlights include reference to the universal availability of epinephrine, along with naloxone, which reverses opioid overdoses, for anyone on campus as required under state law; clarification that parents and guardians shall not knowingly send a child with a communicable or infectious disease to school if the district has determined that the disease requires exclusion from school; and inclusion of new head injury and concussion protocols that went into effect in July.

“I would like to thank the many individuals who invested their time and expertise in ensuring that the language in this regulation reflects current Nevada Revised Statutes, our policies, new laws and to ensure we’re providing the necessary guidance for our students’ health and safety,” she said.

The district regulation was last revised in 2012.

 

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