Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to Public Health Question at jh.edu.

That's Public Health Question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, Public Health on Call goes back to school. Erica Johnson and

Lily Mendelson are school nurses at KIP Baltimore, an open enrollment charter school that

serves pre-K to eighth grade students. They invited Dr. Josh Sharstein over to the Health Suite to talk

about how the first week of school looks from their vantage point. Let's listen.

Nurse Erica, Nurse Lilly, thank you so much for inviting me in close to the first day of

school to hear about how things are going for you as school nurses. But I wanted to start asking

to introduce yourselves to our audience. What has been your path to being a school nurse?

Thank you for joining us. My name is Erica Johnson. I am a nurse and have been a nurse for 17

years now. For the first portion of my career, I worked inpatient at Johns Hopkins Hospital

on the Infants and Toddlers Med my surge unit for about 13 years.

And following COVID and being fairly new to motherhood, I decided to make a change and wanted to

have a different path of nursing, which also aligned with my passion for education.

I have now been here at the Rails House Center going on four years,

and it's been a different journey of nursing, which I think brings so many people to nursing.

It's just the ability to be so flexible. So it's been great. Nurse Lily. Yeah, hi. Thank you.

Again, I, like Erica, worked inpatient before I came to KIP. This is my seventh school year here

with a Rails Health Center at KIP. Prior to that, I did work inpatient as well, also at Johns Hopkins,

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