School health program finds funds eyes City of Key West BP money

School health program finds funds

eyes City of Key West BP money

BY TERRY SCHMIDA

The Florida Keys Area Health Education Center (AHEC) is slowly making its popular School Health Primary Care Program whole, a spoonful of sugar at a time.

The scheme has segued into its second year, only to see hard-won funding of $100,000 – which was passed by the dysfunctional state legislature – vetoed by Gov. Rick Scott.

The Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) voted unanimously at its July 15 meeting to allow AHEC to re-purpose a $50,000 grant, in order to keep the plan alive, but denied the organization’s CEO Michael Cunningham his request for an additional $20,000.

“I have no problem allowing Mr. Cunningham to swap his money from one segment to the other,” Commissioner Sylvia Murphy said at the time. “I have a problem with the $20,000, not because it’s a lot of money, but because there are probably 40 other nonprofits out there who, in one way or another don’t have this year what they were counting on or what they had last year.”

Ultimately, Murphy and her colleagues urged Cunningham to look to alternate sources to make up the difference, including city governments and the School District itself.

The AHEC chief took the message to heart, and made a successful pitch for financial assistance at the Marathon City Council’s Aug., 25 meeting. In the event, some members echoed similar concerns to the BOCC, but ultimately voted unanimously to slide Cunningham $10,000 from its reserve funds, in recognition of the program’s benefits to area students and their families.

“The concern is that it becomes a yearly thing,” Councilman Richard Keating said at the meeting. “We have the funds for this . . . we could just write a check.”

Cunningham also managed to wrangle $100,000 in cash and no-cost clinic sites from the School District. Superintendent of Schools Mark Porter has publicly praised the program, which last year provided more than 36,000 services for 3,767 patients, over the course of 6,900 client visits.

No-cost primary care services were provided to students, their siblings, and even some uninsured parents, Cunningham said. And some District employees also availed themselves of the services, with AHEC billing their insurance companies.

All this was accomplished with $250,000, utilizing two full-time medical providers and one visiting MD at clinics located at Key Largo School, Coral Shores High School, Horace O’Bryant School and Sugarloaf Shores.

This year, with the program short about $25,000, “We’re utilizing three full-time providers at six sites, but are unable to offer all the services we’d like to,” the AHEC CEO said. “And we’ve been very, very busy. A lot of students and families were familiar with the clinics from last year, and we’re meeting some of the real basic needs of the students for medical services.”

Cunningham had been worried that this year’s $115,000 grant from the South Florida Health Foundation would expire if he failed to come up with matching funds, but that concern seems to have been alleviated.

Nevertheless, Cunningham now has his sights set on the City of Key West’s settlement cash from BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill of April 2010, to help make up this year’s shortfall.

“We’ve sent a proposal to Commissioner Clayton Lopez and City Manager Jim Scholl asking for $15,000 of that money,” Cunningham said at press time. “About half of our participating students are in Key West. If they approve our request, we’d be just about whole for this year. We’re still waiting to hear back whether or not we’ve been added to the agenda for their Sept. 15 meeting.”

Cunningham said that AHEC would also be offering the health clinics during the summer, for three six-hour days per week at three or four sites, based on the summer school schedule.