Wednesday's U.S. Supreme Court decision on nursing care for disabled students probably won't have a major impact on Kosciusko County schools, area officials said today.

Tamra Ummel, director of special services for the North Central Indiana Special Education Cooperative, said that the five school corporations in the NCI Co-op already provide nursing services on an as-needed basis.

The Supreme Court decision Wednesday held that a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, school district must provide nursing care for a 16-year-old student who is confined to a wheelchair and requires daily care involving catheterizations, clearing his tracheotomy and monitoring his blood pressure and ventilator.

"People in my field have been watching that particular case," Ummel said. "It's not a new decision, it's new on the part of the Supreme Court making a decision on it."

Ummel said the Co-op, which includes Warsaw, Wawasee, Whitko, Tippecanoe Valley and Bremen school districts, currently deals with 1,773 students with disabilities. Of those, about one to two dozen have complex medical needs, she said.

Each case is treated individually, she said, and the parents, teachers, school nurse and family physician devise a health care plan for the student.

"We have had students who have been oxygen-dependent, ventilator-dependent, who have had tracheotomies and had to be suctioned while at school," she said. "We have had students who have been anywhere from administering their own insulin to being fed through a gastrointestinal tube."

After the health care plan is set for an individual student, Ummel said, "we determine what supports are necessary for success and then find the resources to put those supports in place."

In one case of a severely disabled student who was educated with the general student population and accompanied by a nurse, she said, the nurse's fees were paid by a combination of federal, state and Medicaid funds.

"We deal with it so infrequently on that level," she said.

Warsaw superintendent Dr. Lee Harman echoed Ummel's statement: "Those kinds of cases are very, very rare."

Harman said he did not yet know how far-reaching the decision will be. "We have two or three, at most, at any one time with as severe disabilities as the kid in the lawsuit," he said. "But if it's $40,000 a year ..."

Ummel said the NCI Co-op's budget, which is funded through federal revenues and contributions from the area school corporations that it serves, tries to prepare for necessary medical needs.

"We are prepared in that we have to build within our budget to have the capability of nursing needs should they come up," she said. "Those are things you can't predict so you try to prepare for it ... but you truly can never predict."

She said special education students in the Co-op are almost all served in their neighborhood schools or in their home school corporations. That can include the student attending school, being instructed at home or doing a combination of the two.

She also said she thought the need for this type of service would increase in the future.

"I think in the future, because of great improvements of medical technology and portability of medical technology, that we will probably see more students in the next five to 10 years" with disabilities who will be placed with the general student population, she said.

"I have no idea how much this will cost."

"We already do some of those things," Harman said. "We do have kids that we do all kinds of custodial things for."

He and Ummel also said it is something that is difficult to predict or plan for.

"We're all only an accident away from being involved with special ed," Harman said. [[In-content Ad]]