Students and the community around a Cincinnati Public School in Evanston will have an easier time accessing vital health services via the school’s new Academy of World Languages Schiff Wellness Center unveiled today.
AWL, a K-8 CPS school specializing in language, offers Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian classes as well as English as a second language for students hailing from more than 40 countries. The school also functions as a Community Learning Center, a model that locates basic services for students, family and the wider community within CPS facilities.
The $2.5 million, 5,500-square-foot addition to the school will be a significant expansion of the school’s current offerings.
Chinetta Williams is the school-based health center medical assistant there.
“This Wellness Center will allow us to serve our kids better than ever,” she said. “Having this collaboration of services under one roof allows us to improve our overall outcome for our kids and the community. We struggle every time we have to send kids to vision and dental centers. We can only send a limited number of kids (to other clinics), so we must prioritize who gets the care first. But in reality, they’re all a priority.”
The center was funded by private donations and will offer primary care, dental, vision and mental health services plus a community meeting space. Cincinnati Public Schools will partner with the Community Learning Center Institute, the Cincinnati Health Department, Interact for Health, the Delta Dental Foundation, OneSight and MindPeace.
School staff, students, community leaders, city officials and donors attended an opening ceremony for the new center today, which included emotional testimonials from students and teachers about the importance of access to health centers for students, their families and the community around AWL. A number of the students who attend the school come from immigrant and refugee families who have particular difficulty accessing health care. Others come from Evanston and Walnut Hills, both predominantly low-income communities.
After a brief ribbon-cutting that involved an outsize roll of dental floss, students led visitors on a tour of the new center, which is adorned with a mural commissioned by Art Works. The facilities include four dental chairs, four primary care exam rooms, three vision care stations and other amenities.
Christine Erskine teaches English as a second language at AWL. She has also taken in immigrant children who now attend the school. Erskine recounted numerous obstacles to health care that exist due to long waits at other clinics and tangles of insurance complications.
“With the Schiff Wellness Center, so many of our parents and families will not have to go to so many places and jump through so many hoops,” she said.
This article appears in Oct 10-17, 2018.