THE FOLLOWING IS A NEWS-GAZETTE STORY BY JENNIFER BAILEY
Fifty-eight southern Vermilion County students received school physicals and immunizations this past week under a partnership with Southern
Illinois Healthcare Foundation and the Vermilion County Regional Office of Education.
Regional Superintendent of Schools Aaron Hird said he discussed with SIHF’s Bryan Ferrell about the successes seen with the healthcare clinic
inside Danville High School.
“There’s some really neat things that they’re able to do and provide for their students and some of the families in Danville,” Hird said.
Opportunities where that can continue in rural schools in the county also were talked about, he said.
Examination room inside SIHF Clinic at Danville High School
To start, SIHF is helping with physicals and immunization clinics at some of the schools in Vermilion County.
“That’s one of the needs that many of our families have in our rural schools because they just don’t have a lot of access to medical facilities. So, if you live in Georgetown or Westville or Catlin, sometimes you’ve got to travel a distance just to be able to find someone that can do a physical or an immunization before school. Many people don’t know that there is a cut-off date throughout the school year where kids have to have certain immunizations or physicals if they want to stay in school,” Hird said, about the state requirements.
“So, we want to do what we can to make sure all of our kids are compliant with that,” he said.
Those efforts started this week with a clinic at Westville High School; where south county students from Georgetown, Westville and Salt Fork were
invited to attend.
Each of the schools’ nurses were there and SIHF provided physicals and immunizations.
“We felt like that was a really good start, especially for how quickly we put this together,” Hird said. “Our hope that is in the upcoming years, this can be something that we get this message out early, and that we can plan for it, and that we can not only have something in the south county, but we could have north county and perhaps even the western part of the county as well. And if we did that, we’d feel like all our students had the opportunity to have something.”
Westville School District Superintendent Seth Miller said the SIHF services are really designed for countywide access.
Relationship building and resourcing medical healthcare needs to the community is important, Miller said.
