Editor’s Note: In honor of National Nurses Week, we wrote a feature about school nurse Jan Carpenter.

No excuses. This is Jan Carpenter’s mantra for life.

School nurse Jan Carpenter is a mother, a chef, a guide, and a healer, and she doesn’t believe in excuses. Carpenter says she has always used the obstacles she had to face as motivation for self improvement, not self-pity.

She became a school nurse when she was 38 but before that she had already been a registered nurse for 23 ½ years while working in home and health hospice. She makes an effort to remember the names of all the students she meets.

 “My goal is that when you go to college, or trade school, or whatever it is you’re doing after high school, is that you’ll be able to take care of yourself when you are sick,” Carpenter said. “And that you’ll know how to keep yourself healthy.”

 Carpenter has known the majority of seniors since they were in sixth grade at Henry Middle School, and will watch them take the stage this June.

“There is a part of me that can’t wait for them to go on stage,” Carpenter said. “But I am kind of melancholy. I have mixed emotions.”

The nurse has been there for students in more ways than one through the years.

“I’m not just there for when you’re sick, you can come to me if you have a problem,” Carpenter said. “I get it if you have one parent that works a lot. I used the adversity of my life to do better.”

As a child Carpenter was raised in Rhode Island. After losing her father at age 10 she lived there with only her siblings and her mother who worked long hours to help the family.

“Sometimes I see kids complain about how their parents are divorced, and I think that I would rather have my parents divorced, instead of my father dead,” Carpenter said. “Because then I would be able to at least see him every few weeks or so.”

Carpenter’s mother was forced to work extra shifts in order to support the family, often having to leave her kids alone.

“In general, it made me appreciate my family more,” Carpenter said. “Life is precarious, when you’re numbers are up, it’s gone. But I didn’t allow it to make me bitter.”

She moved on to attend a Catholic nursing school and never allowed excuses for herself or others. Her son, now in college, has ADD and is also held to this standard.

“My son struggled in school, but I told him he can’t use that as a crutch,” Carpenter said. “The world doesn’t adjust to you, you adjust to the world.”