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LOWER LAKE, Calif. – It will be a summer of satisfaction for Konocti Unified School District, highlighted by a June 26 grand opening of the Konocti Wellness Center clinic on the Lower Lake High School campus.
The clinic will give the district the distinction of being one of three such facilities in a rural district nationwide and make Lower Lake the only one of five high schools in Lake County with its own on-campus health care center.
Construction of the center, housed in two buildings, was completed last week.
The center will serve about 3,000 K-12 students and 200 children from birth to age 5.
The need for it is spelled out in the revenue lost in the absences of students because of illness. In the 2009-10 school year, 21,000 days were lost to due to student illness, amounting to $696,168 in lost revenue for the district, according to school officials.
The new center is the product of a partnership comprised of St. Helena Hospital Clear Lake, the KUSD school nurse Susan Salmina, Safe Schools/Healthy Students and Healthy Start, Alcohol and Other Drugs Services. Other partners and services will be added to this list.
The costs were covered by a July 2011 federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in which $95 million was awarded to 278 school-based health center programs nationwide, one of the first awards in a series of allocations to the School-Based Health Center Capital Program. A $444,000 locally written grant was also instrumental to its construction.
In short, it came together because of a great get-together.
“I think it's very exciting,” said KUSD superintendent Donna Becnel. “Right now we're looking at what the need is going to be and what services are going to be offered. We hope to have that finalized before we have the grand opening, which is planned for June 26 at 4 p.m.
“We will be open during the summer,” Becnel added. “It is a wellness center that will not only service the students of Konocti Unified but also will service the families in the community. We are anticipating that the majority of students who are seen here are going to come from Konocti Unified and the surrounding area.”
The genesis of the plan for the center occurred in 2009.
“There was a big need for health care at Lower Lake High School, so we wanted to provide some on-site services,” recalled Joan Reynolds, program director of the Lake County Office of Education's Healthy Start program. “The opportunity to do that came up because there were several grants for capital improvement to build something.
“So we pulled a bunch of partners together – myself and (Clearlake dentist) Mark Cooper; district staff; Jeff Dixon, the principal at the high school; Amy Osborn, a counselor at the high school and a lot of students and outside community – just a lot of partners we thought might be interested in student health.”
Kimberly Tangeman, St. Helena Hospital Clear Lake, and Salmina will be responsible for staffing the center.
The medical staff will be provided by St. Helena Hospital Clear Lake. Salmina will see that all of the services are engaging and that everything at the center is operating.
Reynolds will provide a full-time staffer who will be in the next-door building and case management. Essentially, this building – called the microfitness building – will be where classes will be conducted in a multitude of disciplines, including smoking cessation, yoga, kick boxing, light weightlifting, cardiovascular and bicycling, to name a few.
A $500,000 grant has allowed for the furniture and equipment to go into the building.
It will be outfitted with cutting edge equipment. A screen providing the various options will come down from the ceiling.
“I provided all the pieces that needed to be put together for the grant. I'm in the trenches. But I can't stop to do all the meetings,” said Salmina, who is the only nurse for entire Konocti district.
Discussing the activities the new center will engender, Becnel said, “One of our concerns is obesity in students, which is creating a national at risk. We want to be sure that we do whatever we can to be on the front end in supporting our students with health and wellness and activities. The center is going to be on the front end of things. We'll be providing things like nutrition classes, yoga classes and smoking cessation for which we were we were just awarded a federal tobacco grant.”
The clinic is situated next to Lower Lake's ultra-modern auto mechanics building.
“Originally,” said Reynolds, “it was right off the weight room. The problem was we would have had to renovate that whole section, which would have given us a little more space, but we would have had to go under a slab (for wiring) and then put all the plumbing in there. In the new location we lost a little square footage, but were able to put modern lighting system in.”
Reynolds praised Mark Cooper for his role in actualizing the clinic.
“Mark is on the California School Health Center (Association) board and I think that's pretty lucky for us here in Lake County,” she said. “Also as dental director of clinics he was instrumental in getting the clinic and hospital on board with school health services and was able to give us vital information. He is also on the Lake County County Office of Education school board and he was the go-between between the schools and the hospital.”
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