Wake youth push for school-based health center By Sommer Brokaw

Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - While national leaders debate the value of health-care reform and access to care, Wake County youth are staking out their share. They are calling for the creation of a school-based health center to provide teenagers free and more accessible health care.

Currently, a school nurse is available once a week in most Wake County schools, and the nurse-to-student ratio is one to 2,100 students, three times over the Centers for Disease Control recommended ratio of one to 750 students.

Enloe High junior Rachel Skwerer, who is part of a group of five high school students advocating for the SBHC called Action Now!, said they haven’t chosen a specific school to locate the center.

“At this point, we haven’t come to a decision,” she said. “We’re looking at statistics that makes the school the highest need and that includes minority students because 45 percent of youth who use the health centers in N.C. are African-American. So, we’re also looking at areas with more minorities.”

Skwerer said there are some myths about the SBHC. “There is a misperception that it’s a nurse’s office, but it’s actually more like a doctor’s office. It’s not just nurses, it’s nurse practitioners and physician assistants and a doctor on call that can sign prescriptions and sign students up for Medicaid, and they even serve students who are uninsured,” she said.

Skwerer said another myth is the center will hand out birth control or other contraceptives, but she said it is against N.C. law to distribute contraceptives. They can only distribute information.

Action Now! is the newest project of Youth Empowered Solutions!, a nonprofit organization that empowers youth, in partnership with adults, to make community change.

“I think the real value of what the young people are doing in Wake County is the idea that these services will benefit youth, and the youth leading this effort is essential to the work we do,” said Bronwyn Lucas, executive director of YES! “Young people make up 20 percent of the population, but their voices are often ignored and not included.”

The Action Now! youth team are paid staff of YES!, and the project essentially began when YES! received a grant from the John Rex Endowment to invest in adolescent health issues.

“John Rex Endowment is a great example of funders starting to shift their investments towards those types of programs that engage the target population they’re going to be impacting,” said Parrish Ravelli, supervisor of the youth team. LaTroya Hester, communications manager of YES!, said the JRE granted them $359,150 to gather young people and review the recommendations put forth by the N.C. Institute of Medicine and choose an advocacy area. After reviewing the 32 recommended items, they decided an SBHC would address all of these health issues.

The JRE funds will not pay specifically for a center; rather, it supports staffing, training, program evaluations, equipment, marketing, everything to assist in their advocacy efforts through March 2013.

Skwerer said they made the decision to focus on an SBHC after two months of discussing and debating the 32 recommendations. “We were looking at all the different health questions that young people have in N.C. and across the country,” she said. “We decided that school-based health centers would incorporate all of these different components that come together to make a young person healthy.”

Knightdale High junior Shaquita Williams, who is on the youth staff, said not having an SBHC has affected her. She accidentally stabbed herself in the stomach with a knife during art class. A nurse wasn’t working that day, and she was concerned about getting a band-aid to fully cover the wound so it wouldn’t get infected.

“With $100 million of federal grant funds available for the construction of such health centers through the Affordable Care Act, the youth’s venture comes at a good time,” Hester said in a media release.