School Based Health Center Approved for Houston-Area School District

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Access to easy, affordable health care makes living a healthy life a little easier. But for many families, including Latinos, visits to healthcare professionals don’t happen, often because of transportation issues, negative perceptions, or other factors.

A Houston school district, a local non-profit health center and other community partners are coming together to make regular medical care a little easier.

The Cypress-Fairbanks school board has agreed to a partnership with Good Neighbor Healthcare Center (GNHC) to establish the district’s first school-based health center.

GNHC, a non-profit 501(c)3 United Way agency that provides a full range of primary & preventive health care, will run the health center.

Later this year, GNHC will begin construction on a 10,000-sq.-ft. school-based Federal Qualified Healthcare Clinic. The new clinic will be located within walking distance from a Cy-Fair ISD (CFISD) high school, middle school and elementary school.

CFISD is the third-largest school district in the state of Texas and serves more than 113,000 students.

But the clinic won’t just be for students.

Employees and the community will also have access to the health center’s primary and acute medical care, dental and vision services, health and nutrition education, mental health services, outreach and insurance enrollment and case management.

Latinos make up 42% of students in CFISD and the location for the new clinic has a high Latino and high underserved population.

According to  Bevin Gordon, the district director of health services, the new health center will offer nutrition education and will have a community garden.

Officials aim to open the health center in Fall 2016.

Read more about the school-based health center in the Houston Chronicle. 

Read CFISD’s press release here.