Intervention
Setting
The primary focus of the intervention was to contact parents
whose children had missed more than 10%of the school year
for illness-related reasons. The setting for this project was a
school system in North Carolina with 12,000 students. The
overall academic performance of the school district is highly
rated by the public because of student performance on standardized
tests compared to other schools in North Carolina;
however, there is a significant minority student achievement
gap, which begins in elementary school and widens over
middle and high schools. The school system has a school
nurse and social worker in each school. In August 2006, the
local school board approved changing the preparation of the
Head Start nurse from school nurse to that of an advanced
practice FNP to fully utilize the education and training of the
current itinerant Head Start nurse. The school district houses
18 Head Start classrooms in 9 of the 10 elementary schools.
Since 1965 Head Start has been a federally funded early