Back to the thread – providing health care is a basic jail function. It is not the function of a real school who will not permit “students” on the property who are not fully prepared for the school day. In other words – a real school will refer a medically impaired child back to the parent and refuse to allow that child back on the property without medical clearance (including that the condition is stable). Hang around a real school and say you are suicidal or depressed – or in renal failure – you are gone. Their mission does not include outpatient services.

A real school won’t let a kid on the premises not properly dressed, much less one with deportment problems or who cannot keep up with the standards of the school. Those they flunk out. Telling a child and it’s family that they are getting Fs and they should continue to expect to get all Fs will produce a transfer. It was done at my schools growing up. Worked like a charm. If a student was too ill to attend regularly they transferred to an alternative school.

What OUSD is doing is a logical step on a progression. And I think adolescent medicine is facinating. What we are seeing is the blurred line between a real school and a holding center. You are not going to see these clinics in a white school. They are an experiment in the minority holding camps.

I support them because jails and holding camps need medical facilities. In such places the institution assumes the role of parent and operates at the base level.

So when OUSD establishes a school with a med center, are the medically fragile students across the district going to be transferred there? It would seem to make sense. Students with Diabetes, Students with renal failure, students with AIDS, students on blood thinners, etc might really need to have nurses and physicians available. They may want it, their parent may want it, the school may think it would be safer to place them there. So are the med center schools now going to collect the medical cases? I would expect so no matter what the posturing is at the inception.

It would just make sense.

It is not going to be an easy thing to get into this. And if they run out of funding and try to stop providing this care the students involved and their families would have become accustomed to a higher level of service and care from the school. They would feel terrible to lose it. The chronic medical cases will crowd out the normal kids. It’s inevitable.

Their work is not going to be providing band-aids and checking off forms for sports. I could see them hooking up with a teaching hospital to bring in medical residents for training and exposure to serious adolescent medicine as a concentration. The psych cases alone… Are they going to have a staff psychologist? Mental Health problems kill. They are real – from Schizophrenia which may require more dosing and lab work to dangerous depression which may need more talk therapy. And then there are the dual diagnosis kids.

I think it’s a good thing but there are going to be problems of adjustment. They will need to the support and goodwill of the administration to deal with what they will have to deal with. And they will have to be protected from unreasonable expectations. For one thing in a little time their students won’t get healthier, they will get sicker as more of them are Dx’ed and the Medical Cases transfer in for the service. They will soon find they cannot fix or transform their patients to be what they are not, so their “cure” rates are not going to be as rosy as projected.

I hope everybody sticks with them.

I find myself most aligned with Parent Stuck in OUSD #7 who is unsure that these health services are the best use of monies for our public schools or tax dollars, in general. I am not in favor of OUSD’s push to turning the public schools into one-stop social service agencies, ala “full service community schools.”

Firstly, I do not beleive that OUSD has fulfilled it’s primary obligation of providing a quality basic education for its students. So I am reticent to have any resources or attention diverted to this new task. Adding salaries and building infrastructure in unsuccessful institutions seems like an added waste.

While I don’t doubt that it is convenient for parents to have health care at the school sites, I am not sure that our communities can afford to fund this convenience. There have been recent studies showing that the average Californian is paying a larger proportion of their income for health care. We are already paying for infrastructure that is in place to provide free or reduced cost care in our county facilities via tax dollars. The operating costs for these existing clinics, including facilities and salaries are already high. Many of us also pay for our own private health insurance, with larger copays and less employer subsidy than ever before. Therefore, I cannot fathom creating (and paying for) another tier of infrastructure within the schools to duplicate these services.

I do see the use of providing teens with access to certain types of care that they would otherwise forgo to their detriment, such as family planning/std screening, but would hope that a single NP could provide such services, or refer out for more complicated issues, rather than create full clinics with admin, and multiple paid staff members.

I do not doubt that the people involved in these health centers are well intentioned, however, I am not convinced that the costs of creating another layer of health care outweighs the benefits. Furthermore, I do not support the general direction toward “full-service community schools,” and would rather OUSD commit to simply providing quality academic institutions with sufficient safety and discipline.

Great question. Our focus has been to get the new health centers up and running. Our next task is to determine which sites without health centers can be connected to nearby sites with health centers. There are also a number of school-based health centers that already serve the broader community. For example, Youth Uprising at Castlemont and the Chappell Hayes Health Center at McClymonds serve any adolescent living in Alameda County. The Hawthorne Clinic in the Fruitvale also serves children and families in the broader community. In service of the mission to develop Full Service Community Schools, we will be working with all schools to make sure they are aware of health and wellness resources that may be available to their students and families, as well as working to develop partnerships and resources where there are gaps.