McClatchy: Children without health insurance lose out on learning at school

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Children without health insurance lose out on learning at school
By Tony Pugh | McClatchy Newspapers

* Posted on Sunday, November 18, 2007


WASHINGTON — While Congress and President Bush squabble over health insurance for low-income children, school officials nationwide are scrambling each day to find affordable medical care so that sick and needy students can continue to learn.

Growing numbers of uninsured children have made it harder for educators to focus on classroom achievement without first addressing the medical needs of their students who lack health insurance or dental coverage.

Instead of notifying parents when their children are ill, school officials increasingly must help find health care, arrange transportation for sick children and often advise beleaguered parents about the health consequences of their inaction.

Schools that don't accept the extra responsibility can lose those students to prolonged absences that jeopardize their academic advancement.

In the nation's capital, school psychologist Chandrai Jackson-Saunders got a psychiatrist to provide free Ritalin to a fourth-grade boy with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The boy had become a behavioral problem and missed more than 50 days of school when he could no longer get the drug after his mother's insurance expired.

In New Prairie, Wis., school social workers got the local Lions Club to provide corrective eyewear for a nearsighted fifth-grader whose parents had no insurance. Nancy Wells, a former school nurse in Dover, N.H., once got her own dentist to perform a free root canal on an uninsured student with an infected, abscessed tooth.

And in West Palm Beach, Fla., high school principal Nathan Collins persuaded the local school board to help fund a full-time, school-based health clinic because so many of his uninsured students were missing school because they couldn't get medical care.

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