“This has been a growth experience for me,” says Grasska, whose tenure as School Nurse of the Year comes to a close in June. “The best part about being the National School Nurse of the Year is being able to shed some light on my job for others who otherwise might not know what I do.”

Grasska, a member of the Newport-Mesa (Calif.) Federation of Teachers, Local 1794, and a nurse practitioner, has been a school nurse in her district for 16 of her 23 years in the field. She began her career as a public health nurse in San Francisco in the early 1980s, then transitioned into school nursing. For Grasska, “school health is just another expression of public health. The focus is still on health promotion, just in an educational arena,” she says.

Grasska came to the Newport-Mesa Unified School District in Costa Mesa, Calif., in 1989 and has spent most of her career at the Hope Healthy Start Clinic, a school-based facility she helped establish more than a decade ago.

“The clinic is open to children of all ages. It provides well-child care, health promotion and immunization, and has become a resource for the community,” says Grasska.

In addition to her work at the clinic, Grasska is a faculty member at the University of California, Irvine College of Medicine, and in the nursing department at California State University, Fullerton. She takes the time to introduce medical students and nurse practitioner students to school health and the role of the school nurse.

“School nursing has been a very fulfilling career,” says Grasska, but like all jobs, it has its challenges.

One of the biggest challenges is the increasing demand for school nurses, says Grasska. “Students are requiring more medical services, but there are not enough school nurses despite the high level of need.”

She is also concerned about the conflict that often arises when nurses are forced to delegate duties to nonmedical personnel in order to comply with school district policy.

“Training unlicensed personnel to monitor students makes nurses leery,” says Grasska. School policies allow children with medical needs to be in school, but there are not enough licensed nurses available to monitor students, she says. As a result, “we’re always trying to sort through that and what’s best for the child.”

To ensure her students receive the services they need, Grasska makes it a point to collaborate with teachers, parents and community members.

“If we are going to keep kids healthy in school, we have to network and work as a team.”

“She told me very specifically that I should join band,” says Hilger, referring to her fifth-grade general music teacher, Kathlyn Reynolds.

It was a recommendation that didn’t particularly please Hilger’s parents, she recalls. “We were heavily invested in dancing”—private lessons for the previous six-plus years—and “no one in my family had ever been involved in band.”

Now, almost two decades since Mrs. Reynolds’ recommendation, Hilger, 28, is making her own mark on students—and teachers, administrators and lawmakers—across Oklahoma as the state’s 2005-06 Teacher of the Year.

“It has been a wonderful opportunity for me to travel around the state and talk about the importance of the arts for all students, not just the talented ones, because they teach those critical skills that all students need,” says Hilger, noting that chief among those skills is teamwork and the ability of students to critique their own work.

Another message Hilger delivers: Give teachers the opportunity to make decisions that affect their classrooms. Instead of top-down decision-making, Hilger promotes decision-making from the bottom up. “Ideas should rise up from the people working in the classroom,” she says. Teachers should be vocal about their needs, as well as proactive about articulating whether policies and laws actually work at the classroom level.

As the state’s teacher ambassador, Hilger, a member of the Oklahoma City Federation of Teachers, says she’s also been to just about every university in the state, talking to the upcoming generation of teachers.

Although she misses the classroom, Hilger has enjoyed the opportunity to meet colleagues. “I have seen some amazing educators throughout the state doing an incredible job.” It’s an exposure she wishes critics of public education had. “If people could see what teachers are doing rather than reading [about the problems with education], they would have a new appreciation for what teachers do every day.”

Fresh out of college when she started teaching at Belle Isle Enterprise Middle School, Hilger developed the plan for the school’s fine arts program. She still credits Mrs. Reynolds with changing her life. “You never quite know what you will say or what you will do that will have a positive influence on a student.”