Student Health Care Could Receive up to $40 Million! 

A coalition of local government and non-profit agencies is trying to pull together $40 million to staff Miami-Dade schools with hundreds of nurse-practitioners social workers and health technicians.  UTD President Karen Aronowitz serves on the board of The Children’s Trust which will vote on September 13th on whether to commit as much as $10 million a year for three years to their proposed project. The overall plan, initiated by Children’s Trust and supported by Superintendent Rudy Crew would put health technicians in every school and hire one social worker and one nurse or nurse practitioner for every two schools.  When Crew ran the New York school district in the late 1990s, he found that one of the most common reasons for long-term  student absence from school was undiagnosed or poorly treated asthma. 

Vice President Artie Leichner congratulated the School Board and Dr. Crew for supporting this effort.  “You can’t teach kids if they are not healthy,” said Leichner.