About DebDeborah (Davis) Pontius is a seasoned, dynamic speaker with over 40 years of speaking experience in providing high quality, engaging presentations on everything from Lamaze to lice at local, regional, and national conferences both live and via webinars. Her areas of expertise include pediatrics & school health, health literacy, lice, anaphylaxis, rural & frontier health, deafness, CPR and first aid. She was also a national speaker for BER on school nursing topics.
Her articles have been published in Birth, Nursing Clinics of North America, The NASN School Nurse, and Pediatric Nursing, as well as authoring several NASN position statements. She has served on the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) board of directors and the NASN executive committee. Deborah is a National Certified School Nurse (NCSN) and recently completed a term as president on the National Board of Certified School Nurses (NBCSN). She is a highly acclaimed national school nursing leader and honored as the only Nevada Fellow of the National Academy of School Nursing. Deborah was an NASN Epinephrine Resource School Nurse, providing professional development and technical assistance to the school community related to epinephrine administration. She lobbied for and worked to implement Nevada’s stock epinephrine and food allergy education law. She has taught CPR and First Aid Classes for over 20 years, and was also a certified Lamaze & nursing assistant instructor, and taught in the nursing programs at both Western NV Community College and University of Nevada, Reno. |
What She Does: |
Deborah provides energetic, practical education programs where you walk away saying "I didn't know that!" Regardless of your level of experience, you can be sure you take home something new.
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Her History: |
For 18 years, Deborah was the first and ONLY school nurse for Pershing County School District in the tiny frontier town of Lovelock in northern NV. Like any rural nurse, her 40+ year career has been as a generalist, spanning the life span from labor & delivery to geriatrics and from staff nurse to hospital Director of Clinical Services. She received both her BSN and MSN from the University of NV, Reno, is licensed in NV as an RN and holds NV DOE education endorsement as a School Nurse. Her thesis for her Master’s work was on the characteristics of expert rural nursing practice.
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What Her Initals Mean: |
MSN: Masters of Science in Nursing, RN: Registered Nurse, NCSN: Nationally Certified School Nurse, FNASN: Fellow, National Academy of School Nursing
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