Don't Miss These Photos From the 2012 Convention

Our photographer, Ray from ABQ Photography, did a wonderful job! Below are a few photos from the hundreds he took at this year's conference. Click here to view more!

Introducing Latishia Sanchez, 2012 Youth Track Attendee

My name is Latishia Sanchez. I am 19 years young and am Native American and Hawaiian. I come from the Pueblos of Laguna, Santo Domingo, and San Felipe, New Mexico.

I love meeting new people, eating, texting, helping others, and expressing myself. I am not a quiet person. I dislike awkward silences and try to break the ice as soon as possible. I am proud to say that I help out in the teen health center at Laguna Acoma High School (LAHS) and I love it! I feel that school-based health centers (SBHCs) are important to Laguna and other reservations.

Having lived on a reservation for 19 years, I speak from experience when I say the challenges youth face growing up there are different than adults. I have not had the easiest childhood and have received help from SBHCs. I believe SBHCs – such as the LAHS Teen Center and the Elev8 program at the Laguna Middle school – are crucial to the health of youth. I cannot stress the need of SBHCs enough to get the point across!

I am excited about the convention and can’t wait to meet all of you!

In Love, Health, and Beauty,

Latishia Sanchez

Workshop: E4 - Partnerships for Coordinating Student Health Care: Lessons from Two Large Cities

By Sue Catchings, Chief Executive Officer, Health Care Centers in Schools, Baton Rouge, LA

Marylin Crumpton, MD, MPH, Director, Growing Well Cincinnati, OH, and I hope that you will join us for a meaningful conversation about how to build partnerships that bring more health services to students. We will push you to think outside the box as we brainstorm together, hopefully fostering many "Aha!" moments.

Consider Marilyn and I as pioneers who have done some work that we want to share with you and invite you to go beyond what we have done. Each of us, in Cincinnati and Baton Rouge, respectively, has brought a diverse group of providers together, collaborating for children. You will hear us to talk about mobile dentists, mobile optometrists, and how to integrate seamless care in primary medical and mental health services for children and their families. You will come to understand how we bring providers to school, but also, how we forge relationships in the community that help us fill the gap in services that we know exist.

School systems do have buses and never be stopped because the provider is in one place and the students are in another! We look forward to hearing about new ideas and hope that you will join us in what will be an exploration of what we have done and how you can make it better!

See you in Albuquerque,
Sue Catchings, Baton Rouge, LA

Video Interview: Steve North, MY Health-e-Schools, North Carolina

Check out this video interview of Steve North from MY Health-E-Schools in North Carolina.

by Beth Gaglione, @bgaglione.

Workshop: E6 - The Youth Empowerment Model for Adults

By Parrish Ravelli, BA, Youth Empowerment Coordinator/Program Director, NC School Community Health Alliance/Youth Empowered Solutions, Durham, NC

Working with youth is exciting, inspiring, and yes, a challenge. It requires development, training and practice (and patience)...because let's be honest, working with youth is tough! In this workshop you will gain the tools necessary to establish - and enjoy - an empowered group of young advocates.

Youth have the capacity to change the way our organizations look, feel, and operate. They also have the capacity to significantly increase our organizations’ outcomes. To create an environment that is conducive to youth empowerment we, as adults, need to be equipped with tools to develop youth-adult partnerships. The YES! Youth Empowerment Model is a process as much as it is a culture. It is meant to strengthen a youth program as much as it is to strengthen a youth-serving organization.

We will talk about our role as Adult Allies, reflect on the Millennial Generation (as well as our own), and look at how the YES! Youth Empowerment Model is applied within recruitment and retention strategies. Hopefully this workshop will bring to light for you what it has for us, that the success and sustainability of your school-based health centers can drastically be improved by the degree to which you are engaging those youth that you serve.

Workshop: B7 - Obesity Prevention Inside and Outside the Clinic Walls

By Diana Vinh, BA, Public Health Nurse, Public Health Seattle and King County, Seattle, WA

Have you ever wondered how to address the difficult issue of obesity at your school-based health center? For the last two years we have been taking this topic on - both inside and outside the clinic walls. 

At our workshop, "Obesity Prevention Inside and Outside the Clinic Walls" you'll learn what 7 - 5 - 2 - 1 - 0 can do for you and your students, and how to create a healthier food environment at your school.

Workshop: A8 - Creating a Sustainable School-Based Health Center in a Rural Appalachian Community

by Karen Ballengee, MA, Treasurer, Manchester Local School District, Manchester, OH

This presentation includes a synopsis on how a poor rural school district was able to create and sustain a successful school-based health center. This presentation emphasizes the importance of collaboration from start-up to sustainability.

The 2012 National SBHC Convention is Happening Now!

Visit www.nasbhc.org/livestream to watch the plenaries and select workshops, and be sure to follow along on Facebook and Twitter.

Follow me! Tweet me!

By Marissa Rouselle

For those of us who work in school-based programming, the summer is a time to finish projects, reflect, catch up on reading, and start planning for the year ahead. This year’s NASBHC Convention, themed “New Directions For School-Based Health Care: Hot Topics For Our Future,” will help us do just that.

My co-social media fellows and I will be available to help you with all your social media questions and concerns. We will be working the NASBHC booth, Twitter feeds, and Facebook walls to make sure the hottest topics and information from each NASBHC workshop make it from conference room to smart phone or laptop. It is my hope that through the use of social media at this year’s NASBHC Convention we can share “hot topics” widely so that anyone who reads them will be able to utilize them and make a difference with the population they serve.

So let’s get started! If you don’t have a Twitter account yet, download the Twitter application to your smart phone and create one!

Go to the ‘@ Connect’ tab

and search for @nasbhc.

You can select the Twitter-bird ‘Follow’ tab so that tweets from @nasbhc will appear on your ‘Home’ timeline. You can follow me too @rissrousselle!

And be sure to use hash-tag #SBHC during the Convention so that any tweets you write will show up on the conference feed. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, fear not. Just be sure to find myself or another Social Media Fellow at the convention and we’ll get you started.

Marissa Rousselle, MPH, CHES is a Social Media Fellow at the 2012 National Assembly on School-Based Health Care Convention. She is Program Coordinator for the Changing the Odds Project (CTO) at Morris Heights Health Center (MHHC) in the Bronx, NY. CTO replicates the Wyman Center’s Teen Outreach Program®, providing participants with youth development and sexuality education, community service learning opportunities, and direct access to their School Based Health Center’s comprehensive medical care. TOP® is proven to decrease risk of unintended teen pregnancy, suspension, and course failure1.

1 Philliber Research, 2011. “Who Benefits Most From a Broadly Targeted Prevention Program”

Things to do in Albuquerque, New Mexico

By Angel Butler, Outreach and Engagement Intern, NASBHC

Famous for its signature blue skies and Southwestern traditions, it’s no wonder people gravitate toward Albuquerque, New Mexico’s largest city. Albuquerque has the character of a metropolitan city with the friendliness of a small town.

• Public transportation in Albuquerque is a breeze. Visitors can use the D-RIDE, a bus whose route circulates between Downtown and Old Town Albuquerque for free. A must-see highlight of Old Town: The Man’s Hat Shop – with over 4,000 hats stacked ceiling high.
• If you’re in the mood for an excursion outside of Albuquerque, there is a shuttle and train to culturally-rich Santa Fe.
• New Mexico is known for its hot air balloon festivals, and you can venture up and away on a hot air balloon ride right from downtown Albuquerque. Balloons are launched daily and provide breathtaking sights of the city and New Mexico landscape. Feeling really adventurous? Follow up your balloon ride by exploring New Mexico through a Jeep tour.
• There’s no better way to start the morning than with a fresh cup of coffee, and we suggest trying the local coffee chain Satellite Coffee – rated “Best of the City” by Albuquerque Magazine. The International Rattlesnake Museum is not far, check out the largest collection of live rattlesnakes in the world!
• If history and art are more your thing, take a trolley to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, then head over to Old Town to check out the work of more than 200 artists at the New Mexico Arts and Crafts Fair.
• Once you’ve worked up an appetite, get a taste of traditional Southwestern cuisine at the famous El Pinto Mexican Restaurant. Or grab a sandwich at the award winning Relish sandwich shop. Relax after lunch in the Rio Grande Botanic Gardens while listening to the Summer Concert series.
• For dinner you can reserve a table at the highly acclaimed St. Claire Winery and Bistro, or for a more laid-back experience, try a local favorite: The Green Chili Cheese Burger from the local chain Blake’s Lotta Burger.
• Finally, you can’t leave Albuquerque without having a hearty Southwestern breakfast. Range Café’s breakfast menu is sure to knock your socks off!

What is a school-based health center? – by Dynasty Winters

Dynasty Winters is participating in the Youth Track at the 2012 National School-Based Health Care Convention. She is a student from Wake County, North Carolina.

Two years ago, before my involvement with Youth Empowered Solutions (YES!) and the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care (NASBHC), if you would have asked me what a school-based health center (SBHC) was I would have tried my best to answer you. Today, if you ask me that question, my answer will be, “the solution.”

SBHCs are solutions to problems for young people all over the United States. Not only do they help monitor chronic illnesses, but they also keep students in schools. Most importantly, SBHCs help increase school performance. As a student, I know how hard it is to catch up on work that you miss, especially at my school where each class is 90 minutes long. So why aren’t there any SBHCs in my community? In Wake County? In Raleigh, NC? When there are over 50 across the state? Great question!

SBHCs are a wonderful resource for students and the community. Unfortunately, people in my county are not blessed with the privilege of having a SBHC. That’s why we started Access to Health Care Team at YES! At YES!, we advocate for SBHCs in our community and across the state. We have trained more than 100 youth in our community on how to be advocates for SBHCs and we built support from people in the community through surveys, petitions, and a rally. It has been amazing to have the support from NASBHC in our local work and we are so excited to attend the 2012 Convention. My community is one of many who do not have any SBHCs. That’s unacceptable, especially when it is so beneficial to students everywhere.

We are passionate about school-based health care so we work hard to make sure every student can overcome social injustice. Author and motivational speaker, Steve Pavlina, says it best: "When you live for a strong purpose, then hard work isn’t an option. It’s a necessity."

The Results Are In: Live Streaming Workshops

Thank you to everyone who participated in our poll! The following workshops will be live streamed through our website along with the opening and closing plenaries (download our preliminary program to learn more about these workshops).

• A2: Researching the Link between School-Based Health Centers and Academic Outcomes in Seattle Public Schools
• B3: One Community's Journey from Youth Substance Abuse Tolerance to Effective Prevention and Early Intervention
• C4: Teens Talk About SBHCs in New Mexico: What We've Learned about Barriers to Access and Utilization and What We Need to Do
• D8: Sustainability Strategies Mini Workshops
• E4: Partnerships for Coordinating Student Health Care: Lessons from Two Large Cities
• F3: Miss! My Depo is Making Me Depressed: Mental and Reproductive Health Working Together in SBHCs
• G4: Expanded Use of the Patient-Centered Medical Home Model: Role of SBHCs in Practice and Payment Reform

Live-streamed workshops will have a Social Media Fellow present to Tweet and share resources on Facebook. While you’re watching the workshop online, remember to follow the #SBHC hashtag on Twitter to find extra resources and quotes. You can also chime in with a Tweet – ask a question with the #SBHC hashtag and we’ll try to bring it up with the presenter!

Welcome to 2012’s Convention Blog!

This is a place for you to get more information about the workshops from the presenters, meet the Youth Track, learn about Facebook and Twitter from the Social Media Fellows (watch their webinar here), and find out about fun things to do in Albuquerque.

Keep an eye out for exciting posts, as well as live-blogging during the Convention. Members of NASBHC’s social media team will attend workshops during the Convention and post blog entries to share resources and lessons learned. Stay active on the blog and Twitter, and we’ll share comments and questions you have with the speakers during their workshops! Our Twitter hashtag is #SBHC.

Don’t forget to check out the preliminary program for more information about the different workshops. If you haven’t yet click here to join the fun! We look forward to seeing you in Albuquerque.