A Close- Up Look At People Who Matter : She Helps Kids Brush Up on Dental Health

The boy’s lower jaw was still swollen, giving him the look of a hamster hoarding food, but he felt better than he had for months.

“I went to the dentist on Jan. 10,” the third-grade boy told Ginger Barickman on a visit to her office Tuesday morning.

He opened his mouth to show Barickman the gap in his gum where the infected tooth had been extracted. Barickman, the school nurse at Bassett Street Elementary School in Van Nuys, had been worrying about that tooth for a year.

The child’s face had been swollen for months because of it, but he didn’t go to a dentist.

“Did you bring me a note?” Barickman asked. “If you bring me a note from the dentist, then you can get a toy.”

A box under Barickman’s desk is filled with toys that she uses to coax children into the dentist’s chair.

A mother of three living in Valencia, Barickman is a former pediatric intensive care nurse at Valley Presbyterian who has been the Bassett school nurse for two years.

“This is tougher,” Barickman said of her current job. “If you’re in intensive care, you work in shifts. When your shift is over, another nurse takes over. Here, you take your work home.”

At the school, where cases of tooth decay are sometimes so bad that children feel no pain because the nerves have been damaged, promoting dental hygiene becomes difficult in a mostly low-income, transient and Spanish-speaking population.

But for four months last year, Barickman campaigned--at school and at students’ homes--for better teeth.

The “Flossy the Tooth Fairy” campaign, as she called it, included class demonstrations, handouts and home visits to parents to make sure that students brush regularly and see a dentist.

Many families could not afford dental visits; some could not even afford toothbrushes, she found out. She was able to get toothbrushes donated by Crest and, with help from a fund set up by school nurses, was able to assist parents in paying for their children’s dental visits.

About 5% of the 1,000 students at Bassett Street went to the dentist before the program, which increased to 10% afterward.

Barickman used statistics from the program as the basis for her master’s thesis at La Verne University to show how serious the problems of dental hygiene are in schools.

“Most of us get tired of opening a child’s mouth and seeing the craters,” said Stephanie Yellin-Mednick, another LAUSD nurse who is a member of the regional board of the California School Nurses Organization. “At least this documents it for us.”

The state nurses’ group will honor Barickman at a February conference in Fresno with its 1995 award for research. Jan Pickett, the school’s principal, said she approved the dental program, which starts again next month, because of Barickman’s energy and enthusiasm.

“What’s so special about this is we had all the community behind it,” said Tricia Chicagus, an LAUSD nursing coordinator who works with Barickman. “It’s important because if kids have teeth that hurt them, they’re not going to do well in school.”

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