Over 500 students getting more accessible — and free — healthcare at Columbus school
More than 500 Columbus children will now have more accessible at affordable healthcare through a new program opened at their school.
Motivated by the idea that unhealthy students can’t learn to their full potential, community leaders gathered Wednesday at Dorothy Height Elementary School to help Valley Healthcare System celebrate the opening of the Muscogee County School District’s second school-based health center.
Fox Elementary School is the only other MCSD school with a school-based health center, opened by MercyMed four years ago.
A private donation helped Valley Healthcare pay for the approximately $60,000 renovation to house Dorothy Height’s center, Valley Healthcare CEO Sarah Lang told the Ledger-Enquirer. In addition to a nurse practitioner for pediatric medicine and a licensed social worker for behavioral health, the center will have a mobile unit to provide dental care, she said.
With no copay required, the healthcare is free for insured and uninsured students at the center, which bills the insurance companies and Medicaid.
“We’re excited to be able to provide another layer of service to the residents here in Muscogee County,” Lang told the audience.
Columbus Council at-large representative John House called it a great day for the city.
“The school district should be applauded, the school should be applauded, Valley Healthcare should be applauded for being able to put this together,” he said.
Dorothy Height principal Lamont Sheffield linked this moment to the legacy of the school’s namesake, “a civil rights activist that fought for things like this,” he said, “equitable access to medical care, behavioral health services and just bridging that gap between communities and schools.”
Lela Harvey, whose grandson is a third-grader at Dorothy Height, explained what the school-based healthcare center means to her.
“It makes me feel so good to know that all they have to do is go down the hall for whatever they need,” she said. “… There are a lot of kids that may have issues that are not dealt with.”
MCSD superintendent David Lewis praised this project as a “tremendous example” of a public-private partnership benefiting students and their families.
The United Way of the Chattahoochee Valley also is a partner in this initiative, Lang said.
Valley Healthcare System opened healthcare centers in 1998 at two MCSD schools (Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School and the now-closed Teenage Parenting Center), but they closed two years later because they ran out of money, Lang told the L-E.
Lang said she is confident this effort will be more successful. Instead of relying on state funding, she said, Valley Healthcare will bill private insurers and Medicaid to provide revenue for the school-based centers.
“This is a good model,” she said.
Lewis said Dorothy Height was selected as the initial site for the partnership with Valley Healthcare because “this is where the need was expressed first. Based on our data and in light of the school community and the principal’s support of it, we just felt like it was the right place to start.”
MCSD plans to bring healthcare centers to more schools, Kenya Gilmore, the district’s director of prevention and intervention practices, said.
“We’re waiting to see if Valley has qualified for a new grant that they’re applying for,” she said.
Gilmore declined to mention which schools could be next, but she said, “I’m very passionate about this. So wherever we see the need, that’s where we want to go.”
Ultimately, she said, the goal is to have school-based healthcare centers become hubs serving students from multiple schools.
