Assistant nurse, Roni Brueggemann, is hard at work every day interacting with students. For her, being an assistant nurse is like, “…being a mom to the whole school.” She and her husband have one 10-year-old child together, but once she became a nurse, “I went from having one kid to twelve hundred kids overnight.” She estimates that about 50 to 70 students come into the office a day, most of them having headaches and stomach aches.

Roni’s main responsibility as the health assistant is to help our nurse attend to students. This includes giving out medicine, providing aid to injuries, and filing student folders.

Before becoming a health assistant, Roni worked as an EMT for AMR. Her inspiration for this job stemmed from her elementary school, Fountain of Life, “It was a small school, so it was about 25 of us, and about 15 of us had gone to school from first grade to eighth grade.” During fourth grade, her teacher lit the spark for assistant Roni to become an EMT when, “…we did this whole human body project… It was awesome. So, I knew I wanted to be in the medical field…”

Roni described being an EMT as “tiring”. She did 24-hour shifts where she experienced a multitude of different people, “As an EMT you saw everybody, I had people from the prison, I had veterans, I had homeless, I had the little old lady that couldn’t remember a thing.” She says that while dealing with many patients, it gives you a new view on life. It makes people appreciate things more and changes people emotionally.

While attending Catalina Foothills High School, she got the opportunity to travel to different countries. She was able to experience what it was like to be a minority in a foreign country, which gave her a new perspective and a better understanding of how people feel.

After school hours, Roni spends her time taking her kid to dance and watching sports such as baseball, football, and college basketball. She also enjoys gardening, her favorite thing to plant being sunflowers. She also grows tomatoes, peppers, and grass for her pet tortoise.

It can be hard to be a nurse – any job would be when it comes to dealing with teenagers who are in pain. Regardless, Roni brings the Sahuaro spirit and always has a smile on her face when you walk into the nurse’s office.