Aaron and guest host Jenny Wert speak with school psychologist and PSEA Department of Pupil Services President Nanda Mitra-Itle and PSEA School Nurse Section President Allison Palombo about how measles outbreaks, SNAP and Medicaid changes, and federal education funding cuts are affecting students and the school nurses, psychologists, counselors, social workers, and dental hygienists who support them.
Aaron and guest host Jenny Wert speak with school psychologist and PSEA Department of Pupil Services President Nanda Mitra-Itle and PSEA School Nurse Section President Allison Palombo about how measles outbreaks, SNAP and Medicaid changes, and federal education funding cuts are affecting students and the school nurses, psychologists, counselors, social workers, and dental hygienists who support them.
Episode Resources:
Info on health coverage for uninsured children and teens:
https://www.pa.gov/agencies/dhs/resources/chip
If you need to connect with resources in your community but don’t know where to look, PA 211 is a great place to start:
https://www.pa211.org
PA Department of Health information on Measles:
https://www.pa.gov/agencies/health/diseases-conditions/infectious-disease/measles
Voiceover:
Welcome to Duty Free Lunch, the official podcast of the Pennsylvania State Education Association. Join us as we unpack the issues that matter most to you. From cutting edge classroom strategies to though-provoking policy discussions, if it impacts PSEA members, it's on the menu.
Aaron Chapin:
Hello and welcome to Duty Free Lunch. I'm PSEA President Aaron Chapin. Today I've got a new guest host. I'm here with Jenny Wert. She works in our executive offices at headquarters now. Hello, Jenny.
Jenny Wert:
Hello, Aaron.
Aaron Chapin:
What's your official title?
Jenny Wert:
My title is Manager of Executive Operations.
Aaron Chapin:
How come it doesn't say that on the door? It just says executive offices.
Jenny Wert:
It's too bad we don't have somebody in charge of operations to fix that.
Aaron Chapin:
Well, you should get that thing fixed. So some of our listeners know where you were at before. Where did you work before in PSEA because you've had a couple stops?
Jenny Wert:
I have. I started in our membership department and accounting and then moved over to our government relations department. I've been in a PSEA nearly 20 years.
Aaron Chapin:
20 years. You started when you were 10?
Jenny Wert:
I was a baby.
Aaron Chapin:
Wow.
Jenny Wert:
Infant.
Aaron Chapin:
Wow. And how are you enjoying the executive offices?
Jenny Wert:
I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying working with you as especially Aaron.
Aaron Chapin:
Oh, lies, lies, lies. You're enjoying it though.
Jenny Wert:
Yes, I am.
Aaron Chapin:
You're getting settled in. What's it been like? Three months, four months now?
Jenny Wert:
It has been three months. I finally have some things on the walls. I don't get off the elevator on the wrong floor anymore.
Aaron Chapin:
That's right. Well, good job. Welcome to the team. I'm happy to have you here. Our listeners, we've had a couple different staff members on the podcast. You know Sandy Williams, who used to have Jenny's position. She's in communications now. She's been on. We had Chris Lilienthal since he's gotten a little bit of an upgrade as well. So keep mixing in some different of our staff so you get to know them a little bit better because they work really hard here at headquarters on behalf of all of you. And it works out great with today's topic because today we are talking about the people who keep the students healthy, fed, safe, ready to learn. Look, we couldn't do the jobs in the schools without them. We're talking about the school nurses, the psychologists, the counselors, social workers, and the dental hygienists. And at PSEA, they're part of our Department of Pupil Services, otherwise known as DPS.
Now, why have them on the podcast? Well, they're important part of our schools, but there are policies that are stemming from Project 2025's agenda and the federal laws and the budget actions that have been following are changing the landscape for these professionals and the students. And it's not for the better, everybody. I know you're hearing about this and it's not good news, and that's why we wanted to get these two guests on today. Joining us are Nanda Mitra-Itle, and she's a school psychologist with the Lancaster Lebanon IU. That's number 13 if you're keeping track out there. She's also the DPS president. And we also have Allison Palombo. She's a certified school nurse in the Beaver Area School District. Welcome to you, Nanda. Nanda. Excuse me, Nanda. Oh my goodness. It's hot. I'm going to blame the heat in here. How you doing, Nanda?
Nanda Mitra-Itle:
Good. How are you guys doing?
Aaron Chapin:
Great. Allison, how's it going?
Allison Palombo:
I'm really good. Thanks.
Aaron Chapin:
All right.
Allison Palombo:
How are you?
Aaron Chapin:
Well, let's get things started. We got a lot of questions for both of you today, but I'm going to start with Jenny. I'm going to start. I'm going to ask you a question. That's right. I'm going to put you on the spot because you know all about DPS. You've been working with them for a long time in your staff roles. So for listeners that don't know, what does the Department of Pupil Services do and who are the members it represents?
Jenny Wert:
That is a fantastic question. Great place to start. So you'll hear us call these people the DPS professionals because we love our acronyms here at PSEA. And they are the school nurses, school counselors, school social workers, school psychologists, and even some dental hygienists who make sure that our students are healthy and ready to learn. So they're trusted professionals serving as resources to parents and the whole school community, and sometimes the only physical or mental health provider that a student sees regularly.
Aaron Chapin:
Yes. I remember being in my fifth grade teacher role, just how important all those people were in our school community to giving our students really the best experience possible. And yeah, oftentimes they get a lot of the issues that we just can't handle in the classroom.
Jenny Wert:
Absolutely.
Aaron Chapin:
We couldn't do our jobs without them. So Nanda, first of all, as I mentioned to everybody, you are now the DPS president, so congratulations on that. You just attended your first PSEA board of directors meeting in September. Tell me, what did you take away from it and what concerns did you hear from the school psychologists, nurses, counselors, and other DPS members?
Nanda Mitra-Itle:
I'm very happy and honored to serve as the DPS president. I'm especially grateful to represent these powerful, wonderful professionals who I think I'm happy to be their voice for. I think one of my biggest takeaways really, especially when I attended my board of directors meeting, was really the importance of having our pupil service voices represented at the tables that are being made. Our pupil services, our DPS members are relatively small number within their local communities. There's not as many of us as there are classroom teachers, but I think our roles are big. Our numbers are small, but really our impact is really big. I think we empower the hearts and minds of our kids so that the teachers can do their good work and teach. I think we help everyone see the whole child.
I think when I listen to the school psychologists and nurses and counselors around the state, when we have conversations at our meeting, they're really asked to do a lot and more and more these days with very few resources and sometimes very little acknowledgement. Sometimes there's concerns too about jobs being contracted out, but the expectations aren't. But one of the things I hear the most, that I think inspires me the most is these professionals are incredibly committed. I hear really passionate voices. I hear people that really care about kids in the most difficult circumstances. As president, we want our members to feel heard, valued and connected.
And I hope that our pupil service professionals are seeing that we can help advocate as teachers will work on the educational end. We will help with the social, the emotional, the medical. We will help bring together the whole child because we're really advocating for the students and families that depend on us. So to shorten it, though we may be small in number, I think within our educational groups, we have a big impact.
Aaron Chapin:
I would agree.
Jenny Wert:
Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for that. And it's so wonderful to hear your voice in the PSEA board of directors room. You had a great atmosphere and great perspective into those conversations, so we appreciate you. So I have two questions for Allison. And the first one, Allison, school nurses are often the first stop for students with physical and mental health concerns on top of medications, screenings, immunization records and exemptions. Walk us through a typical day for you with all that going on.
Allison Palombo:
Typical day for me. So this year's a little bit different for me because I only have one building. I'm covering the K-1 and two building this year. For 16 years, I have had our K-1 and two, the three through six building and our Catholic school. So I still oversee the Catholic school, but I'm in one place, so it's wonderful. So a typical day in the K-1 and two building looks a little bit different than it might look in other buildings. But right now, September, October, we're trying to get through all of our mandated health screenings. So I try to start the day by doing one class every day of health screening so I can concentrate on getting them done. Obviously getting a sub in my office is really difficult. So we are limited to ... We're trying to get very creative getting our mandated screenings done, make sure that our kiddos get diagnosed with their vision issues or hearing issues.
So in the midst of the mandated stuff, we take pop-ins. So students who come in with illnesses, students who come in with injuries. Recess is always very busy for us and your program is Duty Free Lunch, which obviously a nurse never gets a duty free lunch because that's when everybody falls from the monkey bars. And that's okay. We care for them very well, especially in the wonderful warm weather. They get hurt a lot. And then in the midst of it all, we've now had measles thrown into the mix. So we are trying to get through our measles outbreak and answering all the questions and the panic and phone ringing off the hook for a variety of things. So yeah, our typical day, it varies, but yes, we're adaptable.
Jenny Wert:
Well, that leads us right into our next question here, Allison, which is specifically around measles. We're seeing the effects of bad policy decisions directly impacting the health of our students and staff. Pennsylvania has now confirmed over a thousand measles cases this year, including a number of deaths and kindergarten MMR coverage has slipped to around 93%, which as we know is below the 95% needed for herd immunity. You've been quoted in the news sharing how school nurses are a trusted source of health information for kids and families. What's that role like right now in this environment?
Allison Palombo:
So we're up to 1,222 cases in Pennsylvania. We are pretty much leading the country right now, I believe, in cases of measles. So it is scary when you hear those numbers. We just confirmed our sixth death. Parents are very worried. So what we've been trying to do is do a combination of proactive and reactive approach. We don't want to be reactive first. So the proactive stuff that we've been doing is making sure that all of our records are accurate, making sure that we can at the touch of a button figure out who is immunized, who is not immunized, under vaxxed versus not vaxxed. I've been talking with admin quite a bit. The exclusion is 21 days and that's a lot and that's a burden on a lot of families.
So what I did was I formulated a letter that I sent home to all of the parents of children who are under vaxxed or partially vaxxed or not vaxxed for MMR. And I basically went through the process. If your child is exposed, you're going to be 21 days at home. Here are your options. And I wanted to make sure that I lined them up with the proper places that they could go and get caught up on their shots if they wanted to. And a lot of them actually, after they got my letter, it was like, "Oh darn, I guess I just missed that last appointment. Thank you for the reminder. I'm going to go ahead and get the shots completed." And that's a wonderful thing. That's my goal is to make sure that everybody understands the resources available to them. I like to have really trusting relationships with my family so that when they ask me about things like this, I can say, "Yeah, this is what's recommended. This is what's safe."
Aaron Chapin:
So Nanda, Pennsylvania, we have about 98,000 fewer people that are on SNAP than a year ago. And the 2025 law expanded work requirements to adults up to age 64, caregivers of children 14 and under. The federal SNAP education nutrition education program has also ended. So from where you sit, how does hunger affect what school psychologists assess, such as attention, behavior, emotional regulation, and how should we think about behavior problems in that light now?
Nanda Mitra-Itle:
That is a fantastic question and a very, very important question to the work that we do to help us understand kids. How can we expect a child to engage in higher level learning when they're hungry? How can we consider them to use the front part of their brain that you write that near cortex and all that learning when the basic parts of their brain aren't getting what they need? Let me give you a really quick story, a really quick example. I was a young psych and working in a middle school and there was a student and he would come to school and he wasn't sleeping at night, but he would come to school, he'd be really tired, he had attendance issues, he'd get into trouble a lot. And the school had tried to do the traditional things, consequences, rewards, encouragement, but we had to change the question. So it's not how do we make him comply, to change the question, but what is the behavior telling us? And it turned out he wasn't getting enough sleep and there were food insecurities at home, so he wasn't always getting consistent food. So that completely changed then the behavior plan.
That increased to improve his attendance in the way the other methods weren't. It was just a Maslow issue. His attendance improved. He started to try more in school. He reported much more positive relationship with his teachers. Everything really changed and it was really evidenced in the data.
And to bring it back to the SNAP and these basic Maslow needs not being met, we can't really expect kids to demonstrate their best thinking when they're most basic needs aren't met. That's the basic message you have to address Maslow before bloom.
Aaron Chapin:
Well, so while we're talking about SNAP, Allison, so when a family loses health coverage, so what kind of changes would your health office see for that student? Do things change up at all?
Allison Palombo:
Yeah. We try. When a student's family has lost their health insurance ... We just had this happen recently to a fairly large family. And you try to be cognizant of what we are asking them to do as far as if the child comes in with a variety of symptoms. Sometimes we can work closely with the family with just improving some of the health literacy. In other words, I can handle a lot of the questions or I can handle some of the concerns or just reassure them or give them some boundaries to look at things at home, over the counter stuff. Or I have a lot of assessment tools that I can listen to their lungs, I can do the basic stuff like that. Whereas maybe on another day I might say, "Hey, give your PCP a call and possibly go in or maybe run over to the urgent care." If they don't have insurance, I'm not going to suggest that as a first line. I'm going to try some creature comfort stuff and stuff that I can actually do from my office.
The other thing is we do have CHIP that we can assist parents in signing up for. So some of them who maybe don't have access to a computer or access to internet, I invite them to come into my office and I walk them through the process. And we do that on my computer system and we get them signed up for CHIP. A student who has a diagnosis of a disability automatically pretty much qualifies for some medical assistance in a lot of cases. So we try to get creative in that aspect so that at least the child can get some coverage for their health in the interim until we can solve the problem for the whole family, which again, we rely on our social workers for a lot of that too. So I would reach out to the social worker and have that conversation. Like Nanda said, we like to pull in every resource that we have and fall heavily on our pupil service support folks to just, what idea do you have? What idea do you have? I live in a small community, so really sometimes we can just reach out to somebody who I know in the community who can just provide some care for a child as well.
Jenny Wert:
Yeah. That's great. Nanda, a federal law passed in 2025 that changes Medicaid eligibility, including new work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks for some adults that can have profound effects on low income families. How do Medicaid changes affect school mental health services, especially in an intermediate unit that serves multiple districts?
Nanda Mitra-Itle:
A fantastic question. And that really goes back to that ecological perspective that I was talking about and how working, those outside factors affect a student. A student's experiences like at their home, access to healthcare, family stability, all of those things walk through the door with a student. It's in their backpack. It walks through the door. They don't leave it behind.
Let me give you another quick story. I had a student and he was a high school student. He was twice exceptional. So he was gifted and had some emotional regulation issues. He was a big boy, very tall, dressed in black, could be very intimidating if you just looked at him, but a sweetheart. But he wasn't consistently completing his work, particularly in his area of giftedness. He wasn't doing it. And he had a lot of attendance issues.
So I went to have a conversation and to have a relationship with him. And so what we found out that it wasn't that he wasn't applying himself and that he wasn't motivated, but he had a mother who was very ill and he wasn't going to advertise this because he wasn't using it to get attention, but it was something very personal to him. He had a mother who was ill and he was worried she was going to die. And so when he was home, he was taking care of her. So it wasn't like he wasn't gifted enough or capable enough or even motivated enough. He was a kid with an adult size worry in his backpack. Huge load. So the connection I see when we talk about access to healthcare, to circle back, is when healthcare becomes hard to our families to access, the consequences don't stay within the healthcare system. They walk in the door with the kids. The kids pull it and it shows up with our kids.
Aaron Chapin:
I'm sorry. While we're talking about this, I want to go to Jenny because we've seen some staff cuts at the Department of Education and obviously this means we've got also some grants that have been cut, including some of those trained special educators. So how do those decisions reach the classrooms and caseloads here in Pennsylvania and impact our DPS members as well?
Jenny Wert:
Yeah. That's a great question. So decisions made in Washington do directly impact our schools and our classrooms and our students. In this case, cuts to the US Department of Ed staffing puts resources in jeopardy for schools. The loss of professional development offered through the Department of Ed means that DPS professionals and special educators are missing out on new strategies and tools that would help them better meet the needs of their students. And all of this is directly impacting students with special needs, contributing to burnout for the professionals who are serving them and fueling staff shortages. All right. Now I have a question and this is a lightning round question for Allison and Nanda. So when budgets tighten, pupil service positions are often seen as extras and professionals like you are not always valued the way you should be. What do you want school boards, lawmakers, and parents to understand about what you do? Lightning round. So Nanda, you go first.
Nanda Mitra-Itle:
I think the big thing I want them to understand is that pupil services is like the foundation for all education, right? We address Maslow. Pupil services really addresses the social, emotional, mental health. We make kids relaxed and we address the needs so that their brains can learn without us addressing their physical needs, their mental health needs, behavioral needs these kids are not going to be ready to walk through the doors to learn. It's a partnership with our teachers. It's not an or it's an and.
Jenny Wert:
Yep. All right. Allison, now you.
Allison Palombo:
I would say that as DPS members specifically, I can address a lot of the support staff that I work with. We remove barriers. We absolutely remove barriers to education so that these kids can come to school and learn. We keep them in their seats. We always say butt in seats because we want to make sure that those kids are in school, not at home. We improve attendance rates. We improve health literacy among families and the data shows that that health literacy just trails off over the summer. Talk to any pediatrician and they get very frustrated because we're there to help those kids and help those families stay consistent with care, with all of their care, with their testing, with their medications, with everything. So yeah, we're big on removing those barriers.
Aaron Chapin:
Yeah. It's an amazing amount of work that you all do. I want to ask one ... Because it's been a lot of negative stuff that we've talked about. Obviously not the work that you do, but the fact that there's cuts and there's some legislation out there that constantly makes your jobs more challenging. Real quick, I want to give you each 30 seconds. What's a positive thing you see on the horizon for students and professionals in pupil services? Amanda, 30 seconds. What's something positive you see?
Nanda Mitra-Itle:
I think one of the positives I see for pupil services is that we have increasing the amount of educated, well-rounded pupil service professionals getting into the field that are passionate and willing to do the work. And it's not about the money, but it's about honoring the professions and they will work hard and they will weather the storm with you if we're honored and valued in our schools.
Aaron Chapin:
Love it. Love it. What about you, Allison?
Allison Palombo:
I feel like we have really good advocacy right now. I feel that we are becoming more and more part of the conversation. We're being pulled into meetings, we're being pulled into conversations. And I think that the districts are realizing that we are part of keeping our kids safe. So all of the safety and mental health support monies that are given to educators from Governor Shapiro, which is great, we are now brought into that conversation and recognized for being useful.
Aaron Chapin:
Yes. Yeah. Well, on behalf of our great union, I want to thank both of you and all of your colleagues for everything that you do. I know our listeners, they know just how important you are and our schools, we couldn't even open the doors without you. So thank you very much. That does it for all of our time today. Nanda, Allison, thank you very much for joining us. We really appreciate it.
Allison Palombo:
Thank you.
Nanda Mitra-Itle:
Yeah, thank you.
Aaron Chapin:
You got it. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. If you got some feedback ... Maybe you got some questions for Jenny now that she's fully entrenched into the executive team on the seventh floor. Maybe you want to know what it's really like working with me.
Jenny Wert:
The inside scoop.
Aaron Chapin:
Yeah. Yeah. You got to send us an email to podcast@psea.org. I'm Aaron Chapin.
Jenny Wert:
And I'm Jenny Wert.
Aaron Chapin:
And you have been listening to Duty Free Lunch. Bye for now.
Voiceover:
You've been listening to Duty Free Lunch with the Pennsylvania State Education Association. Visit psea.org/podcast to learn more and don't forget to subscribe and share. Paid for by the Pennsylvania State Education Association.