School officials are breathing a sigh of relief with the announcement that one full-time nurse will be in every school next year.

Catoosa County Public Schools Superintendent Denia Reese said officials had planned to cut the nursing staff roughly in half because of an anticipated $1 million state funding reduction. With a budget amendment Gov. Sonny Perdue’s signed on March 21, however, the school system is expecting an additional $680,830 for the upcoming school year and plans to keep all the nurses.

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State equalization grant

Original – $5.7 million

Amended – $6.4 million.

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“We’re thrilled that we’re able to fund the nurses full-time in each of our schools,” Reese said. “It allows us to focus on instruction.”

The surprise funding also means schools can restore 20 of the 35 paraprofessional first-grade teacher aide positions Reese announced only a couple of weeks earlier that the system was cutting. She said it’s still too early to tell if they’ll be able to add back any of the 35 teaching positions that were also cut.

School system communications specialist Marissa Chambers said the equalization grant adjustment the governor announced brings the revenue to $6.4 million, up from $5.7 million. Officials said the grant helps even out the funding rural school systems receive compared to those in Atlanta.

“A mill in Cobb County is going to be worth more than a mill in Catoosa County so they provide an equalization grant,” Chambers said.

Except for specially designated sales taxes, property taxes are most school systems’ primary means of locally funding education. A mill is $1 for every $1,000 of property value.

At Ringgold Primary School, principal Nancy Gurganus said the knowledge that the school won’t have to share a nurse with Ringgold Elementary School is a relief.

“It was going to be very difficult,” she said. “We would have had to share the slack with other offices basically.”

She said school nurse Cindy Pederson typically has a student in her office all the time with two or three others lined up waiting. She said the school’s 10 first-grade teachers will now lose one paraprofessional instead of the five helpers they had expected to lose.

“We’ll just have to reschedule and divide up the hours,” she said.

Pederson said she’s glad she won’t have to worry about being stretched thin next year.

“I had to divide my time between two or three schools for the majority of my tenure as a school nurse,” said the eight-year veteran. “It was very frustrating to think that we had come to the point of having a nurse in every school and then we were going to go backwards.”

Pederson said she is among the system’s 11 registered nurses. There are also five licensed practical nurses, she said.