Pine Forest High School is in the final steps of implementing a new clinic in its school and for the community under the umbrella of Community Partnership Schools.

In September, the Escambia Children Trust approved $77,658 to support the Children’s Home Society of Florida with a Community Partnership School director and to install a medical clinic at Pine Forest High School.

The clinic, which is a partnership between Children’s Home Society of Florida, Community Health Northwest Florida and the University of West Florida, will provide services available to school’s students, their parents and the surrounding community. It will be fully operational in December.

“What’s really great is that we’re all coming to the table with our own resources to say, we’re gonna put together a 25-year agreement, and we’re going to make a long term commitment to change and to provide what these communities are telling us they need,” said Children’s Home Society of Florida Executive Director Lindsey Cannon.

Children’s Home Society was a founding partner of the Community Partnership Schools model that is located in 21 schools across Florida. The model calls for a 25-year commitment from four or more core partners, which usually includes a school district, a reputable nonprofit, a health care provider and a college or university.

Pine Forest High School will be one of six new Community Partnership Schools that will expand its model in Florida.

The clinic will have pediatric services, offer annual checkups and vaccines and refer other services in the community not provided in the clinic.

When writing the grant to support the clinic, Community Health Network found there was no medical home or clinic with pediatric services within a seven-mile radius of the community.

“It’s important because from a health care perspective, there’s limited access to pediatric pediatric services in that part of our county. So having a clinic, located there at Pine Forest to not only serve the students of Pine Forest and the surrounding schools, but to also serve the community as well (is a win-win),” said Chanra Smiley, CEO and executive director of Community Health Network of Northwest Florida.

Through the clinic, they will be able to provide help for students in other surrounding schools such as Longleaf Elementary, Bellview Elementary and Bellview Middle schools.

The clinic will be modeled after Escambia County’s other Community Partnership School clinic at C.A. Weis Elementary School.

C.A. Weis also includes an ambassador program intended to give students who are interested in the healthcare field basic training. The opening of the clinic at Pine Forest provides a potential opportunity to replicate the same program to provide hands-on experience, shadowing and exposure to health care.

Right now, the process is focusing on learning what the community wants as UWF is deploying a large wide scale needs assessment consisting of focus groups of people in the neighborhoods, stakeholders such as religious groups and then analyzing the data and feeding it back to the partners.

“You’re getting the voices of all of the players on the ground and it’s just a great way to be able to address the needs of the community and to support kids, parents, grandparents, said Diane Scott said, associate dean and professor at UWF. “Everybody that lives there benefits when the school does better and the kids graduate.”

Pine Forest High School Principal Deborah Ray welcomes the new partnership with open arms as an opportunity to help students and bridge the gap between the community and the school.

Making sure students can have access to health care will improve their overall health, their self esteem and will help them perform better as they remove barriers in their pursuit of education.

“We know if students’ immediate needs aren’t met, like just regular survival needs — shelter, food and (health care) access — they can’t concentrate on the academic one. So for us, it removes a lot of barriers not only with health, but linking them to other resources that perhaps if they hadn’t visited that clinic, we would not have found out about it,” Ray said.

By: Kamal Morgan

Originally posted by Pensacola News Journal