A fifth-grader walked into nurse Jane Boyd’s office. “I’m cold,” he said, with a shy smile. “I got the shakes.”

Boyd slipped a plastic sheath over the thermometer. “I don’t know. Think he’s faking?” she asked with a wink.

Jane Boyd is school nurse at Long Neck Elementary. By 10 a.m. on most days, she’s already seen more than 20 students. The ones well enough to walk out get seen off with the same directive: “If you don’t feel better, you come back, OK?” she tells them. Her unflagging concern for students, among many other reasons, is why the Delaware School Nurse Association chose her as nurse of the year for 2009-10.

She said the honor floored her. At a Thursday, Oct. 8 awards ceremony at Lewes Yacht Club, one of her students asked Boyd why she was crying. Boyd said she never thought much about recognition, so the flood of praise caught her off guard.

“It was amazing,” she said. “It didn’t really hit me until that night. It’s not that school nurses are unappreciated – we’re just unnoticed.”

Born in Wilmington, Boyd has been a registered nurse in Sussex County for 22 years. She attended nursing school at Beebe Medical Center and worked in the hospital’s maternity ward after graduating.

She then worked as a state nurse, making home calls to underinsured, at-risk mothers and babies. She said she always knew she wanted to be a school nurse. As an eighth-grader, she helped out in the nurse’s office, filing charts and on slow days paging through medical textbooks. The profession fascinated her, but the field was narrow – with only a few nurses per Delaware school, openings were few and far between. She knew it would be a matter of waiting. In the meantime, she achieved a master’s degree in nursing at Wilmington College.

In 2001 she took a job as school nurse at Milford Middle School; she transitioned to Sussex Central High School in 2004. When a full-time position opened at Long Neck Elementary three years ago, she snapped it up. Since then, she’s presided over the well-being of 600 children.

Business is brisk these days, she said. October marks the start of flu season. On a given autumn day, Boyd sends eight to 10 kids home sick. Because her office lacks diagnostic equipment, Boyd said she has to use instinct. She cherishes the autonomy, but she stresses the importance of intuition.

“You have to have good judgment,” she said. “You have to know guidelines.”

When possible, students with flu-like symptoms are given a 6-foot isolation, just in case they carry the influenza virus. She encourages preventative measures, which more often than not involve diligent hand-washing.

A Lewes resident for 19 years, Boyd said she enjoys sailing with her husband on weekends. The couple owns a 28-foot Newport, which they’ve sailed to Cape May and across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal into the Chesapeake Bay.

“When you’re at the beach, what else can you do?” she said.

Seeing her students at the award ceremony was nice, she said, because she only seems to see them when they’re sick, unless it’s during lunches, when she sometimes peeks inside the cafeteria to see them laughing and smiling in good health.

Not all visits are students clutching their stomach or complaining about a headache. A tiny blond girl walked through the door, sunny and healthy-looking. Pinched between two fingers was a pearly incisor – her first lost tooth.

“That is a beautiful tooth!” Boyd exclaimed. The girl smiled and nodded shyly. She let the girl choose a purple plastic box to hold her lost tooth.

“You know,” she said, “it’s not about having summers off, or leaving work at 3 p.m.” She smiled privately at the open door, waiting for the next admission.