Snow Hill-based Contentnea Health has brought a new addition to the campus of a Greenville high school with the opening of Pitt County Schools’ first school-based health center.
The clinic opened its doors to patients at J.H. Rose High on Monday with a grand opening event to be scheduled later, Melissa Torres, chief executive officer of Contentnea Health, said. “We want to provide, first and foremost, access to care,” Torres said in a presentation to the Pitt County Board of Education earlier this month. “It’s why we are in the school setting.”
Formerly known as Greene County Health Care, the system opened its first school-based clinic at Greene Central High School more than four decades ago, Torres said. Since opening its first clinic in Walstonburg in 1973, Contentnea Health has grown to provide medical, dental and mental health services to about 40,000 patients a year at locations in three counties as well as mobile medical and dental units that serve agriculture workers in rural communities.
“We are not a free clinic. That’s important to know, and it’s important for parents and students to understand that we do collect from visits,” Torres said, adding that the clinic will see uninsured patients as well as those with Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance. “We do collect patient payments based on a sliding fee.”
Pitt County’s school board approved a plan last fall for the renovation of part of an existing building on the Rose campus to house the center, with a projected opening date of spring of 2024. But school officials said the idea of opening a clinic on campus is one that dates back years.
“It took a little bit of time to find a space where we could do it,” Torres said. “We saw different areas. They had to go to board to allow us to use the space. It was all finalized from the school perspective in December. There were no big delays. It was just a lengthy process.”
The clinic initially will be open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays. It will employ a physician’s assistant, two medical office assistants and a medical family therapy associate to provide mental health support in addition to health services to students as well as to staff members.
“It’s open access, so students are able to walk in,” Torres said, adding that parental consent is required. “They can be referred from the school. They can be brought in by their parents.
“We just want to create access with minimum disruption to the students and their parents,” she said in an interview. “We understand that sometimes its hard for parents to get out of work and have to drive their kids to an appointment. We’re right next to them, so that part we can facilitate for parents.”
Located adjacent to the cafeteria, the 1,440-square-foot space that houses the clinic was formerly used for a structured day program which has since moved. Clinic use is not exclusively designed for Pitt County Schools students and staff. It includes a separate entrance so that patients will not walk through the school to enter.
“We have the same security system that the school has,” Torres said. “They have provided us with a camera and a buzzer to allow people in so the same way you would enter through the actual school, you will enter in a similar way to our clinic, so you would have to be buzzed in, and we would have to see you through the camera.”
Pitt County Schools is donating the use of the space for the clinic, she said, just as the Bernstein clinic space is donated by Access East.
According to the North Carolina School Based Health Alliance, the majority school-based health centers across the state operate without school district funding or staff. Most are paid for through public and private insurance reimbursement and federal and local government appropriations.
Contentnea Health is funded by state, federal and foundation grants and receives 50% to 80% of its funding through the Health Resources and Services Administration. But Torres said no grant funding was used for construction of the clinic at Rose.
“We paid for this construction out of our savings because we truly believe in providing access to the students,” she said. “We saw this opportunity and we had no hesitation to put a clinic there. We need to make great investments in our community.”
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