FWCD’s
Community Hero The values, character and ethos of those engaged in any aspect of the medical profession became crystal clear during this pandemic year. School Nurse Lori McCormack, RN, was Fort Worth Country Day’s hero … and superhero, for anyone who didn’t already know it. Her strong medical ethics, advanced problem-solving skills, and patient and family advocacy skills were put to the test as she spent the entire 2020-21 academic year as the School’s frontline COVID-19 advocate and nurse.
Shifting her home base from an office outside of the Sid W. Richardson Round Gym (Katie Jordan ’09 took over caring for student boo-boos and dispensing medications) to a converted Greenroom (formerly known as the Black Box Theater), this space was FWCD’s COVID-19 hub. It was here that Nurse McCormack, by herself and in layers of personal protective equipment, tended to students, faculty or staff who presented symptoms or became ill and completed contact tracing to ensure that anyone in contact with the virus could properly quarantine, each and every day. This virus was isolating to all … those in the FWCD school community, in Tarrant County, in Texas, and worldwide. At FWCD, Nurse McCormack was the most isolated of all, taking the Florence Nightingale Pledge that she took when she earned her nursing pin at the University of Texas at Arlington in 1992 seriously and to heart. Serving as a member of FWCD’s Medical Advisory Team; liaison with Tarrant County Public Health; FWCD COVID-19 Decision Tree writer and editor and redrafter; and the School’s lead contact-tracer on a team of six comprising Ed Chisholm, Stacy Bourne ’02, Jordan, Cindy Allen and Laura Terry, McCormack managed her job tasks with a critical eye toward mitigating risk while exuding care, compassion and empathy. On top of all these tasks,
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THE FALCONER
McCormack also took and made phone calls and wrote emails and texts daily, including weekends, to and from parents, faculty and staff related to quarantine, virus symptoms, the after-effects of the illness, and mental health issues related to fear of the virus or lingering symptoms after recovery. “We should have more absences this year than ever before as parents keep mildly symptomatic children home,” wrote Head of School Eric Lombardi in his December 2020 Notes from the Head eNewsletter. Lombardi anticipated that Nurse McCormack would have more phone calls related to helping parents navigate symptoms, quarantining and testing. In early March, her estimate of contact-tracing calls was at an astounding 5,000. Later in March, McCormack was honored as FWCD’s Community Hero by the second-graders. The Community Heroes project, which integrates visual arts, language arts and social studies, allows second-grade students to celebrate everyday heroes in the community. Students select their community members and conduct interviews to better understand and connect with their heroes’ work. The art comes in when students photograph and then paint their heroes’ portraits. The final project showcases the community heroes’ stories through the students’ eyes. With risk-mitigating protocols in place to keep people distanced and safe from the virus, students did not have the same access to community members. So the Department of Fine Arts team came up with a different take on the project: They focused on McCormack only. Instead of conducting a formal interview with her, the students wrote notes about her. All the messages started with “I am grateful for Nurse McCormack because ….”
