Twiggs schools Wellness Center offers health services to students and families in need, free of charge

This story was originally published in the Times Journal Post.

Now that the school year is back in swing, the Twiggs County Public Schools Wellness Center is open for business again for the 2024-25 academic year. 

The center, which has received nearly $1 million in grant funding, serves the students, faculty and staff of Twiggs public schools in addition to their families. No health insurance is required, and Medicare and Medicaid are accepted.

Twiggs schools Superintendent Mack H. Bullard said the project began to address a lack of healthcare options in the county. The Wellness Center opened in March. 

“What I learned when I became superintendent was we had no full-time medical, no full-time dental or full-time mental health services in our community, and this was at the time of Covid, so we had many of our students who were suffering with asthma-related symptoms, grief, mental health issues related to grief and stress,” Bullard said. 

The Emory School of Medicine initially awarded a $10,000 grant to Twiggs schools in 2021 to learn what specific needs there were in the community. Students, teachers and community members gave input about what they needed most. The Georgia Department of Education later granted the school district around $350,000 to create the center. 

When the state was divvying up Covid federal relief funds, Twiggs received just over $600,000 to support the project.

The Wellness Center was created to address a critical gap in access to care in the rural community, and Bullard said it’s led to positive impacts for students and teachers. 

“Students would have to miss full days of school because they were sick or not are not well enough to come, and in cases where parents were trying to get them to see a doctor, the parents themselves have to take off of work, and the closest doctor’s office was 30 minutes away in Macon,” he said. “Now that’s not necessary. They can call the school-based health center, request that those appointments be made right there on the spot.”

During school, Bullard said staff members escort students to the health center for their appointments and accompany them until the appointment is finished. If the parent can’t make it off work, they have the option to attend their child’s appointment remotely, so they can still see what’s happening with their child with the medical provider in the room.

Faculty and staff members are also able to schedule appointments, so they can easily walk over for whatever care they need — whether it’s a dental cleaning, check-up, vaccinations or therapy — and go back to school afterward.

Now, students and faculty are missing fewer days of school, and students are having better educational outcomes. In middle and high school, academic performance is increasing, Bullard said, and attendance is improving in middle and elementary schools (It’s a bit trickier to improve attendance in high school, he said, since many high school students are able to drive).

“You have healthier children, happier children,” he said. “You’ve got to have great teaching. You’ve got to have great materials, but you also have to keep the kid in school in order for them to learn and achieve.”

Additionally, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, students from the Central Georgia Tech’s dental hygiene program come to the clinic to perform cleanings. Patients with more serious dental problems can receive a referral. 

Bullard says he hopes to eventually add vision care to the center’s services. 

“We really wanted to be able to put an ophthalmologist in there as well,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll be able to add that if we get another round of grants that we can apply for so the children don’t have to drive all the way to Dublin or Macon to get glasses. They actually can get their glasses at the Wellness Center.”

The Wellness Center offers family medicine, internal medicine, physicals, prescriptions, behavioral health and family counseling, sick visits, walk-ins and vaccinations Monday through Thursday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. For now, the clinic is only open on days the schools are open according to the academic calendar — so it wasn’t open over the summer — but they hope to eventually be open year round. 

Reach the Wellness Center at 478-864-3127. It is located on the campus of the elementary, middle and high schools at 952 Main St.