Students at this Fort Worth elementary school will soon get medical care on campus

A Fort Worth elementary school is set to become the site of a new pediatric clinic under a partnership with the University of North Texas Health Science Center.

The Fort Worth Independent School District’s board voted Tuesday to approve the partnership, which will allow the medical school to begin providing care at Eastern Hills Elementary School, which is located in an underserved neighborhood in east Fort Worth.

Dr. Christina Robinson, medical director of UNT HSC’s Pediatric Mobile Clinic program, told the Star-Telegram that the medical school will begin providing mental and behavioral health care at the school over the next few months, and will begin offering comprehensive medical care next spring. Under the partnership, UNTHSC will send medical providers to staff the clinic, while the district will continue to own and maintain the space.

Before 2021, Eastern Hills Elementary was one of four Fort Worth ISD campuses that hosted a clinic through a partnership with JPS Health Network, Tarrant County’s public hospital. But in 2021, the hospital closed the majority of its school-based clinics, including all of its Fort Worth ISD locations. Rather than offering care on school campuses, JPS directed students and their parents to its neighborhood clinics and partnered with Cook Children’s, the primary pediatric health care provider in the county, to provide care.

Robinson said the goal of the UNT HSC program isn’t to reopen every clinic JPS closed. Program leaders don’t yet know if there will be more campus-based clinics in the coming months and years, she said. The medical school decided to partner with Eastern Hills because the elementary school is in a part of the city without easy access to pediatric services, she said. The nearest Cook Children’s neighborhood clinic is about six miles away. For families who rely on public transportation, the trip takes more than an hour each way. The medical school’s mobile clinic has made regular visits to the neighborhood for years to provide vaccines and other care, she said, but those visits weren’t enough to meet the neighborhood’s needs.

“This was kind of a perfect opportunity,” Robinson said. “There’s space available, there is need there, there were community partners and collaborations that already existed. And so it was really just kind of a perfect solution.”

While the clinic at Eastern Hills was approved with no board discussion and relatively little public attention, other districts have gotten pushback from parents when trying to implement similar plans. When a campus-based clinic went before the Denton Independent School District’s board last summer, parents and other residents voiced concerns during the meeting’s public comment period. Several described the clinic as a “Pandora’s Box” that would lead to greater district overreach, the Texas Tribune reported. The Denton school board ultimately approved the clinic by a 6-1 vote.