Mayor Wants School Nurse Cuts in NYC

By Selena Ross/City Hall

One of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's first actions as mayor was to try and pull nurses from parochial schools. A year later, he cut dozens of school nursing jobs. Every year since, has tried to scale back the program.

Under this year's proposed budget, Bloomberg has targeted them again. His current plan would remove them from schools with fewer than 300 students or, in the “doomsday” contingency scenario, from schools with fewer than 500 students. A handful of public schools and 177 parochial schools would be affected.

Parochial-school administrators, furious at what they describe as a siege on their children, are wondering why they keep drawing the mayor’s wrath. Henry Fortier, associate superintendent of the New York Archdiocese, asserts that the city has bigger and costlier public health programs, and the attempted cuts have repeatedly backfired as parents have pushed back.

According to union representatives and political observers, a mix of politics, labor problems, and changing public health goals has brought all school nurses under fire during the Bloomberg years. Now they worry that the mayor, free from many political pressures in his final term, may be serious about starting to wean New York off the whole program.

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