A month after board members considered closing L.H. Williams, school set to build new health center

Just a day after the grand opening of its school based health center at Bruce Elementary, the Bibb County board of education approved state funding for another clinic at L.H. Williams Elementary, bringing a new resource to the Pleasant Hill community.

At its May 15 meeting, the school board accepted a $998,277 grant from the Georgia Department of Education for the renovation and operation of the school based health center.

Lasharn Ferroudj is the project manager for the district’s school based health centers. She said by setting up the center inside of the school, the clinic comes in with an established connection to the community.

“This is a way for Bibb to kind of lock in and really support the community in ways that we weren’t able to in the past,” she said. “I think that we’ll begin to see more creative utilization of school spaces in the near future.”

The new center at L.H. Williams — like the center at Bruce Elementary — will offer vaccines, preventative care and treatment for common illnesses and also include a telehealth suite.

The school district partnered with First Choice Primary Care to operate both of its clinics. The district also formed an advisory group and spoke with parents and administrators to determine the best place for the center.

The nurse’s office will still be giving students more immediate care, but the health center offers care for more “complex” issues, Ferroudj said, such as taking a culture or treating a chronic illness like diabetes.

The center should open up sometime in the fall, Ferroudj said, and will start out by providing care to staff and students before opening up to the rest of Pleasant Hill. 

“We wanted to be able to build community, not just offer these resources but actually have practitioners and staff that are in relationship with the faculty of the school and also the larger community,” she said.

At the same time the application for the grant was put together, the school district considered closing L.H. Williams and other elementary schools.

L.H. Williams was operating at 60% capacity, with only 285 students enrolled and a capacity of 475 students, according to the district’s March presentation to the board of education. 

Principal Cynthia Jones said she believes the school’s cultural significance forced the district to consider other options for addressing enrollment issues.

Ferroudj said she is glad the board reconsidered consolidation and that the district can continue collaborating with the Pleasant Hill community. 

“We wanted to make sure that we’re not taking away academic learning space, but this is a building that could support (having) one or two less classrooms,” Ferroudj said.

Like many schools across the district, L.H. Williams deals with chronic absenteeism, with 42% of the school’s students missing 10% or more of the school year in 2023. 

The school has an attendance team that supports students who aren’t making it into the classroom, but Jones said many students were not coming to classes at the end of the pandemic because of a lack of access to healthcare.

She said she hopes the new health center will keep students on campus and not force them to go elsewhere for care.

“I really feel that this is going to be the answer to our absenteeism problem because kids will get immediate healthcare,” Jones said.