Health-Care Hub

At Broad Acres Elementary, educators say the school's busy health-care center is a necessity for many sick or trouble children.

By Darcia Harris Bowman

Silver Spring, Md.

The wall clock in the school health center ticks by 8:30 a.m., but the new family never shows. Nurse Ladys Lux gazes out a nearby window with narrowed eyes, as if searching for her missing patients in the knots of dark-haired children scurrying across the schoolyard through a biting, mid-December wind. "Normally, we don't schedule physicals when the families first get here because so many don't stay," Lux says. "But we did this time when we saw this family had other problems."

The petite woman's voice trails off as she turns away from the window and reaches for the phone on the reception desk. The family she speaks of is headed by a poor, single immigrant mother from El Salvador who recently moved into the surrounding neighborhood with her five children. One of the youngsters has spina bifida, a congenital disability that can require extensive medical care. It's unlikely that any of the children have received much in the way of medical care during their young lives, Lux says, but that will change now that they're here, at Broad Acres Elementary School. They will now have access to a pediatrician, a nurse practitioner, a nurse technician, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, therapists, and, of course, Lux herself.

The Broad Acres clinic is one of 1,500 school-based health centers nationwide that bring a wide range of medical, nutritional, and mental-health care to millions of students and their families. The centers, the first of which sprang up in the early 1970s in Dallas and St. Paul, Minn., provide an important safety net for children and adolescents—particularly the more than 10 million today who lack health insurance, according to the Washington-based Center for Health and...