• By MARSHA SILLS
• Advocate Acadiana bureau
• Published: Jun 12, 2009 - Page: 1BA

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LAFAYETTE — Headaches and respiratory ailments accounted for the majority of the 5,500 student visits to the Our Lady of Lourdes Health Center on the campus of Northside High School last school year.

All are easily treatable, but at most schools the aches and pains may send a student home from school or a parent away from work to deliver medication or to make a trip to the doctor’s office.

“It keeps the students in school and the parents at work. That’s the reason why we’re here,” said Shannon McLaughlin, a registered nurse and supervisor of the Northside health center.

The Lourdes health center has offered free minor healthcare, counseling and health education services to students since 1996.  The small center is adjacent to the high school’s gym. During the summer months, the clinic remains open and provides physical exams for athletes, but is also available for whatever needs students may have.

“At the beginning of the school year, we see about 60 kids a day,” McLaughlin said.

The health center is one of 63 school-based health centers in the state that provides primary and preventative health and mental health services at public school sites.

McLaughlin said on average, the center charts 5,500 student visits a year. In 2007-08 the site had the third-highest visit rate among school-based health centers in the state at 5,569 visits, according to the Louisiana School Based Health Centers annual report.

The centers are overseen by the Office of Public Health’s Adolescent School Health Program.

On average 62 percent of the centers’ budgets are covered by state funds, according to the last available annual report from 2007-08. Some of the centers are operated by school districts, hospitals and nonprofit organizations.

The St. Martin Parish School Board operates three centers: one each in Breaux Bridge, Cecilia and St. Martinville. The centers provide services to 18 school sites.

The Northside site is the only health center in Lafayette Parish. But the parish school system’s plans to open a school-based health center in the fall at Carencro Middle have been put on hold pending the state’s financial crisis.

The site is one of six new pending centers across the state that received planning grants last year.

The Adolescent School Health program had requested a start-up pool of $1 million in competitive funding earmarked to help the sites get off the ground in the first year.