D51 Health Clinics

The district has been moving forward with the demands of a growing community and keeping an open mind in accepting new ideas. Health and medicine facilities are important for high schoolers that come in contact with billions of various germs daily in order to keep them from having to miss class due to illness. There has been suggestions made around the Grand Valley that authorities are considering implementing health clinics into the schools.

These clinics would provide physical and mental care for students from qualified doctors with easy access because they are right on campus. This would eliminate the hassle of parents trying to schedule an appointment and take off of work to drive their child into town to be seen by a physician. Not only will students be allowed to use the centers, but the community as well as district officials assure citizens that they would be affordable to all. Senior Nicole Hunter commented, “I think these clinics would be good because it allows people that can’t afford doctors or need medical assistance the ability to have it.” An upside of the clinics is that if an outbreak such as influenza was diagnosed, the doctors could quickly respond to the situation and eliminate further students and teachers from being infected.

Mesa County is known for having extremely high suicide rates and nbcnews11 states, “District 51 says one in five students have an undiagnosed mental health issues,” They hope that treating kids on site could help reduce these statistics drastically.

Some parents may have concerns because choosing a physician for their child is a personal decision based on parental beliefs in medicine. The clinics would not have specialized doctors, but more of a generalized practice to cover the basic needs of hundreds of students. The issue of teenagers abusing this new resource also arises,  possibly reducing their attendance in class by creating phantom symptoms, or students wrongfully consuming medication prescribed by a false diagnosis without seeing a specialist.

How will we afford such state of the art clinics? By increasing taxpayers dollars? Some of our schools are physically falling apart, textbooks in classrooms are years out of date, and we lack the technology needed to send students into the working world. Stephen Hatch voices his opinion on the matter saying,“I feel like we need to focus on our schools needs with the better textbooks and we spend the majority of our time in school so we want it to be nice. Then with the extra money it should be put to these clinics because healthcare is a serious issue in today’s society and some kids don’t have access to a doctor so that could really change their lives.”