Illness, Enemy of Learning

Picture a little boy in the first grade with a toothache that feels like a hole in his head. All he wants is his mother. She’s at work, has no health benefits and can’t afford to take her son to a dentist today or even next week. It’s hard to imagine that child being able to learn.

In California more than half of children ages 6 to 8 suffer at some point from an untreated dental problem that interrupts their learning, according to an education study recently released by the Assembly’s Select Committee on California Children’s School Readiness. The report examines the link between good health and early learning.

Committee Chairwoman Wilma Chan, an Alameda Democrat, sees poor health in a student’s early years as being directly linked to failure later, especially under California’s tough new academic standards. She is sponsoring a legislative package that would focus on improving health from infancy through 8 years old, the age by which children should be reading well.

The nine bills in their current form would automatically enroll newborns from poor families in Medi-Cal for a year instead of two months, seek funding for dental care for children, promote good nutrition, provide mental health services, train teachers to flag health problems early and create a state department of children’s services modeled after the California Department on Aging.

California’s budget deficit discourages expensive remedies, but Chan believes that with little additional money the state could encourage greater cooperation between providers of existing services--such as county mental health departments--and school districts. She supports phasing in her proposals to spread the costs.

It’s unlikely that Chan will get approval for her whole package, but she is on the right track. To those who protest that a child’s health is a parental responsibility, we say that schools have to deal with what’s in front of them. Increasingly, that includes emotional health problems of very young children.

The Assembly study found that nearly half of the state’s kindergarten teachers report that “half or more of their students come to school with social or emotional problems that impede success.” One of five schoolchildren has a treatable mental health problem, according to information from the U.S. surgeon general cited in the report. When illnesses such as depression go untreated, children are more likely to withdraw or disrupt class and get stuck with a “troublemaker” label that follows them from grade to grade.

Vision problems also prevent many children from actively participating at school. California requires a basic eye-chart test for nearsightedness in the primary grades, but other deficiencies may go undetected for years. A principal in a school district near San Jose told the committee that he ordered vision tests for 400 failing ninth-graders; 200 needed glasses. A working mother who spoke at a hearing in Salinas said that because getting the proper care took too long, an eye infection caused her daughter to lose part of her vision.

Even head lice can keep children out of school for months when they are passed back and forth within a family. Few children can miss that much school and keep up.

A student’s distraction because of a toothache or a long absence with an infestation of lice is impossible to accept because it is so fixable. If better cooperation between state agencies and school districts can begin to solve such problems, achieve it now.