Taldo has already weathered one health crisis with the school district. She started working for GCISD during the 2014-15 school year when ebola emerged as a global concern. When a Dallas resident was diagnosed with ebola that year, Taldo said the district began making preparations.
“We wanted to make sure everybody was safe, and so we bought some extra gowns and a few N95 masks and some shoe covers,” Taldo said. “We put together these little kits to send out to the clinics so that the nurses would be able to protect themselves.”
Since then, the leftover equipment has stayed in nurses’ closets in the school district. As COVID-19 continued to spread this month, and as districts closed and news emerged of shortages in medical equipment, Taldo knew it was time to put the remaining equipment to work.
“We wanted to make sure that if we had things that were sitting there—that we did not feel were going to be utilized within the school system because we're closed. We wanted to make sure that [local clinics] had that equipment,” Taldo siad. “So we gathered it all up.”
In addition to personal protective equipment, or PPE, Taldo also requested that her department round up any no-touch thermometers.
“I said, ‘Don’t rob yourself to where you have nothing left because there’s still a chance that we’ll be going back to school, and you still need to have something with you,’” she said. “They had some extra things in their clinics. Some of them were like, ‘I’ve had these in my closet forever.’”
The health department coordinated with school principals to be let into the building to access their supplies. Taldo said she would wait in the parking lot for the nurses, who would then load the equipment into the back of her car. Taldo would then drop the equipment off at the John Peter Smith Health Clinic in Grapevine and at Baylor Scott & White Medical Center—Grapevine. The no-touch thermometers were donated to local police departments.
“It's one of those things that when you look at schools, especially when we're closed in a situation like this. we have a lot of resources for people to utilize or borrow to help get through this,” Taldo said.
As soon as she reached out to her district nurses with the call to arms, they were ready to respond, she said.
“This is what we do, and this is what we do well,” Taldo said. “They all have a very servant heart and spirit of helping. So they were ready.”
While the buildings are closed, the district’s health department can still be found helping the district with its other initiatives, such as delivering meals and providing IT support. Additionally, if teachers who are interacting online with students feel that a student or family could use a wellness check, the district’s counselors and nurses are being tagged to step in and check on the family.
“At this time, we need to have that human connection," Taldo said. “It’s so that [the kids] know: ‘We’re here, and we miss you.’ And they just have that continued trusted adult relationship with them.”
