Can better school health care keep kids in class?

Poor health is one reason why students miss so much school that they fall behind academically and risk dropping out.

UCLA researchers will spend the next five years studying whether school-based health clinics improve student health and academic outcomes in Los Angeles.

Why it matters

The rate of students who missed about a month of school — or more — soared in the early years of the pandemic and attendance has yet to rebound. In Los Angeles Unified about one-third of students were chronically absent in the 2022-2023 school year compared to a quarter of students statewide.

What we know so far

There are wellness centers on more than a dozen LAUSD campuses. They offer primary care, mental health services and dental care to students and the surrounding community.

“When we look at the students who tend to use school based health centers, they're the types of students that face a lot of challenges accessing traditional sources of health care,” said pediatrician Rebecca Dudovitz. “Those are exactly the same types of students that are very likely to have chronic absenteeism.”

Dudovitz worked on recent research that showed students who visited these clinics, particularly for mental health treatment, had better attendance.

What’s next

The National Institutes of Health awarded researchers, including Dudovitz, an estimated $3.2 million, five-year grant to analyze data from the on-campus wellness centers, academic information from schools, and outside medical providers to better understand the impact of health care on student attendance, grades, and health outcomes.

Collaborators include Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine, health care provider Southern California Kaiser Permanente, low-income insurer L.A. Care Health Plan and nonprofit The L.A. Trust for Children’s Health.

“We're engaging a wide variety of stakeholders in solving the problem of chronic absenteeism and supporting kids to come to school every day,” Dudovitz said. “It's not just the responsibility of school systems, it's all of our responsibilities to really think about that.”