JPS Health Network closed at least 15 school-based clinics in Fort Worth area in 2021

JPS Health Network closed 16 clinics in or near Fort Worth area schools last year after more than a decade of promoting the school-based clinics as an essential access point for underserved children.

JPS, Tarrant County’s publicly-funded hospital, has for years operated clinics in or near public schools in Tarrant County. These school-based health centers, as they are known, were usually operated on property that was owned and maintained by a school district. The clinics were typically staffed and operated by JPS employees.

They offered a range of low-cost preventive care for children, and were designed in particular to reach poor children and children who don’t have health insurance. At these clinics, thousands of children got sports physicals, received vaccines, and got treatment for minor illnesses and injuries as well as for conditions like asthma and diabetes, according to various promotional materials from JPS and school districts.

In 2020, JPS listed 18 school-based health centers on its promotional materials. All clinics 18 closed in March 2020, as the coronavirus spread and communities began to close schools and businesses to try and slow the spread of the virus.

In February 2021, that closure was made permanent for at least 15 of those 18 clinics, according to JPS’ list of clinic locations.

“JPS Health Network partnered with Cook Children’s to provide pediatric care to families with school-aged children and adolescents,” JPS spokesperson Jessamy Brown said in an email. “Starting on February 1, 2021, services for students and their siblings were relocated from the modular clinics located at school campuses to brick-and-mortar Cook Children’s facilities located in Tarrant County neighborhoods.”

Brown said the change “allowed for access to expanded and enhanced services, such as extended open hours, after-hours urgent care, and specialized care for adolescents.”

In the Fort Worth school district, at least four health centers closed after JPS made its decision.

Michael Steinert, the district’s assistant superintendent for student support services, said JPS officials notified district leaders of the plans to close the health centers starting in 2018.

“We definitely don’t feel like the rug was pulled out from under us,” Steinert said. “We understand that the needs change, the models change, the sustainability of it changed.”

The shift reverses almost a decade of school-based health center expansion in Tarrant County. In 2018, JPS approved new contracts or extended existing agreements with at least three school districts to continue operation of the school-based health centers.

The school-based health center in the Crowley school district, which was near Parkway Elementary School, opened in the 2007-08 school year. As recently as 2019, materials from the school district advertised the clinic as being able to “provide health care services and improve CISD student health” and also credited the clinic with reducing student absenteeism.

Some school districts also invested their own resources to promote and expand the school-based health centers. In 2012, Fort Worth’s school district received $500,000 in federal funding to build a new clinic. Now that the school-based health center there has closed, that space will be converted into a eye clinic for district children that will open in January, Steinert said.

Because the closures occurred in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, some pediatricians have said they added additional disruption for children who were already having a hard time accessing care because of pandemic-related closures.

Vaccination rates that protect children from preventable diseases like measles and polio have dropped among Tarrant County children during the pandemic. Across Fort Worth school district, just 85% of kindergartners had received the measles vaccine at the start of the 2021-22 school year, according to state data. In 2019, about 95.75% of Fort Worth kindergartners had received the shot, according to the report from that year.