Missed School Days: A Correlational Study Between Children with Asthma and Presence of School Nurses

Currently, there is a lack of research on the relationship between full-time nurse presence in schools and absenteeism among school-aged children with asthma. The purpose of this paper is to determine the correlation between the amount of time school-aged children are absent and the amount of time a school nurse is absent. A nonexperimental quantitative descriptive correlational study will be conducted with 14 randomly selected participating schools in the Chesapeake public school district. Each school will receive a questionnaire inquiring about the number of asthmatic children enrolled in the school, number of absences of said children, weekly hours the school nurse is present, and number of absences of asthmatic children when the nurse is not present. After obtaining the data from the schools, a single-sample T-test with an alpha of 0.05 will be used for statistical analysis. It is expected to reveal that the number of absences of school-aged children with asthma will have positive correlation with the amount of time the school nurse is absent. The findings of this study will implicate that having a full-time school nurse increases attendance of asthmatic school-aged children