Maine Assembly on School-Based Health Care

Presented @ Portland City Hall “Step Up For Kids” 2009 by Judith Abdalla, Junior, Portland High School

Hello every one let me start by introducing who we are. We are the young people, the next generation of leaders. We are the ones who will bring harmony, equality, farness, and justice by learning from one another and by teaching one another. We are the leaders of tomorrow and the ones who will lead the way for the ones younger then us. We are the generation of change. We are youth that are trying to make both our community and the world a better place by tackling one issue at a time.

We are a group that is called “What’s Next?” from Portland High School and we are working with the Portland High Health Center to educate teens about health issues by doing peer to peer projects. The reason why we got started was because In the year 2008 about 3 or 4 students where stunned at the rate of teen pregnancies in our school and community so they came together to discuss this issue and to find a way to prevent and to educate. With every group meeting that was held by these students a room was filled with passion and even more interest in all that we could accomplished. From that we planned our first presentation which got Portland high students asking “what next?” will we present. That’s where our club name “What’s Next?” came from. With the help of Portland High School’s health center and our adviser Phyl Rubinstein we continued these presentations and later on we did an HIV/AIDS awareness day which was so successful that we actually ran out of testing tools and the health center had to order more immediately.

The reason why this group and what we do is so important is because it is effective in raising awareness and getting the youths attention* we realized that peer to peer projects and a twist of creativity made people interested in what we had to say; it made people listening and it made many think about their own lives and how they can keep themselves safe. Our presentations helped many students realize that there are places and resources available to them in their communities and better yet their school. This group is important because by it we inspire, prevent, and most importantly educate.

Our health center offers just about every thing the doctors office offers, such as teeth cleaning, birth control, shots, physicals, and we even have a social worker who takes care of mental health needs. We know through research that school based health centers keeps students in school and decreases absenteeism; not only that, but we also Provide health care for student who mights not have it.

If there is no funding to keep the health center open, then like I said before, there may be students that would be left without a school health center that offered many of the same things the doctors office did. If we didn’t have funding then we would be left with out a supervisor to coordinate our club. If we are left without funding, then we cant get creative with much of our projects. Which mean it could be harder to bring in speakers to come and talk to our students. If we didn’t have funding then it would be difficult to continue doing all that we are working on right now.

What we are doing is one step closer to a better world* we are preventing many students from engaging in risky behaviors and through it I know we are changing at least a handfull of students with each project presented. We are Portland high school students and we would like to say thank you for listening.