Students with diabetes deserve a school nurse who can effectively manage the disease. Tensions between the school and families sometimes emerge when a child with diabetes goes to school. To resolve these tensions in Colorado, stakeholders collaborated to implement a statewide program to meet the needs of students with diabetes. Colorado school nursing leadership partnered with the National Association of School Nurses to adapt components of the Managing and Preventing Diabetes and Weight Gain Program (MAP), funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Healthy Learner Model for Chronic Condition Management, integral to MAP, provided guidance for the Colorado Collaborative to design the Diabetes Resource Nurse Program. The program supports the practicing school nurse, and facilitates collaboration between the family, school, and health care provider. This article describes how stakeholders in Colorado chose to collaborate when faced with rising tensions over how to best manage students with diabetes.

School nurses collect voluminous amounts of data in a variety of ways and use the data to describe trends in students' health and patterns of illness in the student population or to identify ways to improve care. NASN identified years ago that a national school nurse data set was needed to enable data-driven decision making for the millions of children who attend school each day across the United States. Informal work has been done in the past 5 years in preparation for the current joint NASN/ National Association of State School Nurse Consultants workgroup. This article is the first of a two-part series related to the importance of data and national efforts to develop a uniform data set that all school nurses can collect. Collecting data, and collecting it in the same way as other providers, will demonstrate what school nurses do as well as provide the data necessary for robust research on the impact of school nurses on students' health.

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BACKGROUND Schools struggle to support health needs of students with diabetes due to limited funding/resources. A competency framework can help individual schools clarify the knowledge and skills required for school‐based diabetes care within their unique context, and inform the development of standardized diabetes education for health staff. METHODS A consensus‐building technique, known as the Delphi method, was used to create a competency framework for diabetes care at school with a panel of 37 stakeholders. A continuing education program based on the resultant framework was developed and pilot‐tested with school nurses. Pretest and post‐test scores on knowledge, perceived competence, and self‐efficacy were compared to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. RESULTS Consensus was obtained for a total of 70 competencies: 22 competencies for health aids, 36 additional competencies for school nurses, and 12 additional competencies for diabetes resource nurses. Thirty school nurses completed the continuing education program and demonstrated significant improvement in diabetes knowledge, self‐efficacy, and competence in pathophysiology and diabetes care tasks (p < .01 for all). CONCLUSIONS Developing a consensus framework is an excellent starting place for stakeholders to identify the skills and knowledge required for various school personnel and to ensure that all school health staff members receive adequate diabetes education.

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