Jackson Heights school health clinic closed by city with little explanation

I.S. 145, where a city-run Gotham Health clinic was shuttered at the start of the school year. Eagle photo by Max Rivera

By Max Rivera

The little-explained closure of a city-run Gotham Health clinic inside a Jackson Heights school is hitting students and parents hard, and has left a gap in healthcare for students and families struggling to find it elsewhere.

Parents and teachers at I.S. 145 are now attempting to save the city-run clinic, which was first opened 25 years ago but hastily closed in August.

In the months that have followed, parents say they have been left with limited and inconvenient healthcare options for their children – the closest Gotham Health clinic is nearly a mile away and not open on weekends. And school nurses have become overwhelmed by the amount of young patients in need of services that they can no longer refer to the onsite, school-based Gotham Health clinic.

“This clinic basically just disappeared,” said William Harsgrove, a teacher at the school.

Though New York City Health + Hospitals, which runs the city’s Gotham Health clinics, offered little explanation to parents and teachers about the clinic’s closure, they later said that the site had too few patients to justify its presence in the school. However, parents and teachers dispute that claim, saying the clinic was often busy, with the vast majority of the school’s children electing to utilize the clinic in lieu of a primary care doctor.

Parents say that the Gotham Health clinic was a unique healthcare option that solved for many of the problems they faced while attempting to find healthcare for their children in New York City. School-based health clinics work in conjunction with the Department of Health nurses, providing a more robust scope of care on a referral basis. The clinics take walk-in emergency appointments and provide primary care-type services, like annual well-visits and vaccines to children who sign up for their services.

There are no out of pocket costs to parents for school-based health clinic services and students are able to enroll in the clinic’s programs regardless of insurance or immigration status, according to the Department of Education.

“School-based health clinics do not make money,” said Kate King, the president of the National Association of School Nurses. “If you’re lucky they’re self-sustaining.”

King described the role of a school-based health center as one that works together with traditional school nurses. The overlapping relationship is challenging for many officials to understand, King said.

Searching for answers

Harsgrove, along with a number of parents, pushed interim acting Superintendent for District 30 Lisa Hidalgo for more answers about the closure of the clinic at an October school district meeting.

Hidalgo said that she didn’t “know all the details,” adding that she was told that there was “not enough funding” for the clinic and that “it wasn’t being used to its capacity.”

“We do need it,” Hidalgo told parents and teachers in October. “[But] no one is responding.”

Hidalgo did not return further requests for comment. Ivan Rodriguez, the principal of the school, declined to comment.

An undated letter from H+H sent to Rodriguez over the summer announcing the “difficult decision” to close the clinic lacked a detailed explanation for the closure.

Offering an alternative for students and parents, the letter included the addresses of three area Gotham Health clinics.

In a statement to the Eagle, H+H said that the nurse practitioners and other staff formerly working out of the school’s Gotham Health clinic were needed at other H+H sites. No Gotham Health clinic employees were fired due to the clinic closures, but instead transferred to other clinics within the city’s healthcare network.

“Nurse practitioners and other staff were transferred from the low-volume school-based clinics to our health centers,” a H+H spokesperson said in a statement. “This shift maximizes our nurse’s time and expertise, while preserving and enhancing the health care services our students need.”

But parents and teachers at I.S. 145 say the city’s hospital system poorly assessed the healthcare needs of the students and families at the school.

“To remove this clinic that the community relies on so heavily really is awful,” Kate Menken, parent and former PTA member, said.

The clinic is gone but healthcare needs remain

In lieu of nurse practitioners and registered nurses with the ability to administer medications and treat advanced medical issues, two school nurses, with a more limited scope of practice, serve the school, Geri Fils-Aime, the school’s parent coordinator, said.

“We had at least 80 percent of the children signed up [to use the clinic],” she said.

A spokesperson for State Senator Jessica Ramos, who is seen as a potential challenger to Mayor Eric Adams in the 2025 primary race for the mayor’s office, also decried the clinic’s closure, saying that it shows the city lacks awareness of what a school like I.S. 145 truly needs.

“It’s a health care desert,” the spokesperson said.

Though the clinic’s closure has had an impact on the students utilizing it as a primary care facility, it also has had an impact on the more acute medical needs of the student body at I.S. 145.

A student recently injured in a dance class had to wait for paramedics to arrive because the school nurses’ scope of care prevented them from rendering aid beyond bags of ice or bandaids, Fils-Aime said.

With the clinic staff gone, Fils-Aime said that she fears the nurses won’t be able to keep up with the demand and adequately care for the school’s students.

While H+H has made no indication that it intends to reopen the clinic, a local lawmaker is attempting to pass legislation that would potentially prevent similar closures from happening in the future.

Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas, who represents Jackson Heights, said that she plans to introduce a bill that she claims would fix the gap between a school community’s need for healthcare and the number of nurses it has.

Too often school administrators rely solely on published ratios to determine adequate staffing levels of school nurses and overlook other factors that could contribute to a need for a higher ratio, according to King, the president of the National Association of School Nurses. However, González-Rojas’ legislation would require agencies to follow expert guidance to determine the appropriate ratio.

Currently, the city requires one nurse on staff per school.

But King says the ratio needs to be more flexible and allow for more nurses in schools with a larger population of students with potentially complex medical needs.

The disparity in the student to nurse ratio can be made worse by an increase in the school’s population over the course of the year.

I.S. 145 often sees students enrolling throughout the year and many of those students have gone without formal healthcare for unknown periods of time, parents say.

The problem has also been exacerbated by the asylum seeker crisis, which has seen an influx of new students arrive at the school likely in need of medical care.