In her junior year of high school, then-LueAnn Houser and a couple of girlfriends who were interested in nursing decided to volunteer at the Veterans Administration Hospital. She had been interested in nursing ever since she was a little kid. Her family had a neighbor named Elaine who was a nurse.
Whenever she or any of her siblings got sick, her mother would take them to see Elaine. “And I thought, that’s who I wanted to be like,” says LueAnn Beck, Grant High School’s nurse. “I want to be like Elaine.”
So in pursuit of her dreams, Houser and her girlfriends put on their new blue and pink pinstriped nurse’s smocks with white caps on top and jumped into a brand new and eye-opening experience.
They fed war veterans unable to do so themselves. They took patients on walks. She started to see the way the group had an impact on the patients’ lives, which in turn made an impact on her. She knew then that nursing was the field of work for her.
Fast forward to today, and Beck can be seen working the halls of Grant. She’s been at Grant for two of the 20 years she’s been a school nurse. It’s her second stint here, having worked at Grant in the 1970s. Before she worked as a school nurse, Beck worked as an ER nurse and labor delivery nurse for 12 years.
In late February and early March of this year, Beck’s parents passed away within days of each other. A few weeks later, her uncle passed away, too. Although their passings were recent, Beck has fought hard to maintain her composure at work. “I adored my parents,” says Beck. “They were sweet people.”
But now Beck is back at school, where her main goal is to be available whenever possible for students who need help, whether it be a medical problem or just someone to talk to.
Selflessness has always been a quality of Beck’s. Her youngest daughter, Jacqueline Nicolet, remembers that her mother never fails to ask the person behind the counter or the college student pumping her gas how they are doing.
Ron Beck, her husband, says when their kids were young, LueAnn Beck managed to be a full-time mother, wife and a homemaker, all while going back to school and working at the same time. Beck also coached her daughter’s softball teams for many years. “She would be on the sidelines of our kids’ games studying microbiology,” says Ron Beck.
LueAnn Beck was born in 1953 and is the oldest child of three. She grew up in Portland, like her parents. Early on, she thought she wanted to be an astronaut. Her interests and favorite classes at school were science and astronomy. One of the best presents she remembers receiving as a child was a telescope. She would prop it up on her lawn and gaze at the sky. She wrote letters to NASA, explaining that she would be a good candidate as the first woman astronaut ever.
Beck’s teenage years in high school were not the easiest times. She was involved in many sports like softball and basketball, but also remembers being extremely shy and quiet. “I wasn’t bullied or anything like that. I was just very quiet and sometimes had a hard time,” Beck recalls.
Sports are where Beck excelled during high school, earning a spot on a high-level club softball team. After high school, Beck attended Portland State University for pre-nursing and then afterward for nursing, graduating in 1976.
She met Ron Beck at PSU when she was in a sorority and he was in a fraternity. They married and started their family in 1976, and four years later they had their first son, Robb; three years later Amy was born; and Jacqueline arrived three years after that.
Beck decided to become a school nurse in 1991 when a friend suggested she might like the more convenient work hours with her kids still being young and her husband traveling for his job. She worked as a substitute nurse for one year, and then worked as a school nurse in the Reynolds School District for 11 years. More recently, Beck has worked in multiple elementary schools in the Portland area, such as Irvington, Alameda and Laurelhurst.
Earlier this school year at Grant, Beck worked with two nursing students from the University of Portland, Anita Polyakov and Emelia Gurbrud. The two shadowed Beck for six weeks in her office at Grant to complete their time working with a nurse in a community healthcare center, just as they have in other fields like orthopedic care, psychiatric, pediatric, mental health, internal medicine and more.
“A lot of nurses who we have clinical rotations with are often jaded, or are somewhat unenthusiastic about their jobs,” says Gurbrud. “LueAnn is so genuine about her job. It’s very refreshing.”
According to the two, Beck provided them a sense of direction, but also let them do things on their own because she trusted them, guiding them without hovering. “Her actions spoke more than her words though,” says Polyakov. “We saw how much she loves what she does.”
When talking about her husband, Beck claims: “He’s the perfect fishing buddy.”
He shares with her a passion for camping, hiking and fly-fishing. A love for the outdoors was something she and her husband have that they instilled in their children. Now that their children have grown up and moved out, the two enjoy going on camping excursions and fishing trips to escape their daily lives in the city.
Son Robb Beck remembers a time when he was younger when his mother started a dental van, a mobile station that provided dental care to children who couldn’t afford it. It drew enough attention to appear on the nightly news.
“My mother was a role model for compassion and for helping people,” says Robb Beck.
Amy Beck remembers how her mother made her children wear bicycle helmets long before the law required it. But she didn’t stop there. Each of the kids had to use three-foot long bright orange flags on the backs of their bikes. “I think at one point, Robb just stopped riding his bike altogether because he didn’t want to be seen with that,” Amy Beck recalls.
For many students at Grant, Beck is the same school nurse who worked at their elementary schools when they were younger, which has allowed her to watch students she knew as kindergarteners grow into young adults.
Having Type-1 diabetes and taking care of her blood sugar was a difficult task for Cassie McCready when she was a young student at Alameda Elementary School. Luckily, Beck was available for Cassie every day at lunch to go over what she had eaten and help her manage her insulin levels.
Today, McCready is a sophomore, perfectly capable of managing her diabetes herself. Once in a while, she will stop by to see Beck. She goes in to “talk to her sometimes, if my blood sugar is low or if I just want to talk.”
Beck’s responsibilities at Grant include building a basis for a healthy lifestyle that will affect students for the rest of their lives. She helps kids with severe allergies and chronic medical conditions with medication. By working with the students, parents and doctors alike, she helps make the students’ lives at Grant as normal and safe as possible.
“You may never see how a student turns out after high school, but if I could be one little brick on that path in life, to help you get to the next step or to carry onwards, that’s what I try to be,” says Beck. “We’re a family here.”
