Students Brush Up on Dental Care (VA)
September 29, 2010
A teachers’ workroom inside Belle Heth Elementary School transformed Tuesday into a small-scale dental clinic, the second this month at Radford sc hools.
Students beside a tin bucket filled with neon yellow, blue, green and orange toothbrushes fidgeted with their hands while they waited their turn.
Meanwhile, classmates in two reclining chairs received a semi-annual teeth cleaning, flouride treatments and molar sealants from a dentist and one of two hygenists.
Monique Fluellen, a third-grader who fretted loudly about the inspection inside her mouth, pointed to the teeth she’d just begun to grow as dentist Jason Powell counted her pearly whites.
She has her own dentist, she argued, and didn’t need the school-based visit.
But Powell, who traveled to Radford from Maryland as a doctor for Smile Programs — a well-known mobile preventative care dental clinic with branches in 15 states — eased her mind.
"We need to count your teeth to make sure you have them all," he quipped.
Once she was finished with a flouride treatment, she was ready to go through it all again.
Powell’s visit is an effort for the Radford City school system, and others in the New River Valley that work with mobile dentists, to reach low-income students who might otherwise fail to have their teeth checked.
Tammy Weston, school nurse coordinator for Radford City Public Schools and a nurse at Belle Heth, said the clinicians who visit her schools are a "God send," although they have been criticized for failing to follow up with larger issues, such as filling cavities or surgical needs.
A few states — Florida, Mississippi and South Carolina — have enacted legislation limiting the clin ics’ access because of the prevention-only care.
The mobile dental clinic doesn’t charge participants, but rather bills public health providers like Medicaid and private insurances for reimbursements and accepts grants.
Because traditional dental clinics historically have a low participation in Medicaid, the mobile clinics fill a void for some children.
In many states, Medicaid reimburses dentists for less than half of their charges, according to a 2008 policy brief from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, which makes the typical office-based dentist leery of low-income patients.
As a result, some school systems have welcomed the school-based clinic visits repeatedly. This is the third year for both Radford and Pulaski County Public Schools to take part.
Pulaski County’s schoolchildren will begin seeing the dentist next month.
"I can’t see any downside," said Weston. "Because even though they’re not getting fillings, they’re still getting told what needs to be done."
The dentist sends home with students a sheet that outlines any additional surgical work that needs to be done, and they’ll return to the school in six months, Weston said.
In contrast, during years past, Radford’s students sometimes were seen by a local dentist, but the check-up was usually cursory, she said.
Students would line up along the wall, and the dental staff would shine a flashlight in their mouths and profess their dental needs, she said.
Still, a study last year shows the potential ill effects.

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A July 2009 study in the Journal of the American Dental Association suggested that compared to conventional dentists, children treated by the prevention-only services were 2.5 times less likely to get restorative or surgical treatments.
Regardless, the school system hopes to increase participation.
While every student, low income or otherwise, received notice of the clinic, only about 20 students of the 490 at Belle Heth responded.