Offering more than medicine
Mary Newell tells a story that sums up why she’s become a health-care trailblazer for the Kent School District: In her first year managing the district’s school nurses, a boy at East Hill Elementary was absent 55 percent of the year.
After looking into the problem, the school nurse discovered that the child had severe asthma and that his family couldn’t afford an inhaler. He was missing school because he couldn’t breathe. Administrators provided him with an inhaler and he made it back to class.
“We have so much absenteeism that could be worked out at school,” Newell said. “A healthy kid can learn.”
Stories like these have fueled Newell’s passion for improving health-care services in schools and have pushed her to help create Kent School District’s first school-based health center at Kent Phoenix Academy, the alternative high school with about 300 students that opened this year.
The 48-year-old single mother of two recently won a prestigious national fellowship to tackle the issue of health care for children across the district’s 40 schools.
The new health center scheduled to open next month at Kent Phoenix Academy will allow students of the school to receive free health care and mental-health counseling.
Nurse practitioners will staff the center and be able to prescribe drugs to treat relatively minor health issues, unlike a typical school nurse who has to rely on over-the-counter drugs to fix kids’ ailments.
The health center is a huge deal for many families in the district - some of them new immigrants - who can’t afford health care.
“When kids have an earache, they can get treated at school,” Newell said.
Her biggest challenge
Newell had a deep passion for health care even before she became the district’s nurse facilitator seven years ago.
In the early 1990s, she was the director of the Family Childbirth Center at the former Providence Medical Center in Seattle and then moved on to become the nursing-program director at Highline Community College in Des Moines.
But changing the way the Kent School District handles student health care is perhaps her biggest challenge.
Her mission started in May 2006, when she became one of 20 health-care professionals across the country to be accepted into the Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Fellows Program, a three-year advanced leadership program for nurses in executive positions.
As part of the program, Newell has to create a project that will greatly improve access to health care. The Phoenix Academy’s health center is her project.
Last spring, she helped the district get a $225,000 grant from the Washington state Department of Health to open the center. The district is working with the Kent Teen Clinic and Kent Youth and Family Services to provide staff at the center.
“Every kid deserves the ability to get their shots and see a nurse,” Newell said.
A bigger dream
School-based health centers aren’t a new concept: Seattle Public Schools use them, and they exist across the country.
Newell’s dream is to eventually open one in all of the district’s schools. Maybe that seems like a pie-in-the-sky goal, but Newell has a huge proponent of the program behind her: Kent Superintendent Barbara Grohe.
Before Newell even brought up the concept of a school-based health center, Grohe says she was thinking along the same lines.
“The challenge is that so many people have to help you carry it out,” Grohe said. “We have an entire staff at the school that has to collaborate around a child’s health care.”
If anyone’s going to pull it off, it’s Newell, said Grohe, who describes Newell as a problem-solver and a good listener.
“She’s a person who’s always building kind of a net under these children so they don’t fall,” Grohe said. “She gets as many people as she can to build that net underneath them.”
It’s no easy task, especially because Newell doesn’t have the administrative staff to help her accomplish many of the time-consuming chores that go along with her job.
Her current goal is to find $500,000 to turn the girl’s locker room at Phoenix Academy into a health center. The center is spread across several offices now, and the locker room is not being used.
Luckily, she has a deep-seeded drive that keeps her moving through the challenges. One thing she hardly ever does: work overtime. Her main priority is her own kids and making sure she’s around for her youngest son, Cameron, 13.
“This has been a job that has blessed me and has also given me horrendous challenges,” Newell said.
Kirsten Grind is a Seattle-area freelance writer: kirstengrind@gmail.com