Minnesota School-Based Health Alliance

The MN School-Based Health Alliance would like to introduce itself to you and all who are committed to optimal student health and academic success! 

We serve MN students and their families, school districts, and communities through advocacy and technical assistance to advance a high quality, time-tested, effective model for health AND education equity: School-Based Health Centers. 

School-Based Health Centers provide essential healthcare services where and when students can reach it: in schools!  

SBHCs provide students K-12 with annual and sports physicals, preventive asthma care, acute care concerns like strep throat and allergy symptoms, flu shots and other needed vaccines, mental health evaluation and counseling, dental and eye exams, and more. Imbedded within school communities, SBHCs work in collaboration with onsite Licensed School Nurses and school support professionals to amplify the reach and positive impact of one another.

Students receive care irrespective of ability to pay, and there is no cost to the student or family. 

This means that for 50+ years, SBHCs have relied on local, state and national grant funds and individual contributions to cover costs when insurance coverage is not an option.

Without Minnesota’s school-based health centers, there would have been thousands more unnecessary ER visits, hundreds more untreated dental cavities, too many more suicides. Students would have missed more class time. Parents would have missed more work. Over 20,000 Minnesota students would have faced unmet healthcare needs. 

However, because 30 schools in Minnesota have had school-based health centers for years, we see this instead:

• Over 20,000 families accessed benefits for themselves, and their kids got free care. 
• Students got sports physicals without ever spending time benched. 
• Entire districts lowered their risk of communicable disease through immunization programs. 
• Teen parents had access to prenatal services, parent education and ultimately, graduation. 
• A few hundred students a year started to feel sick in school and got strep tests and antibiotics before even going home.

Learn more about how MNSBHA supports the health of the next generation at https://www.studenthealthmn.org/.