Six Months, Thousands of Classroom Hours Saved: The Impact of School Health Services

For school-aged children, chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more days of school per year. In the 2023-2024 school year, 1 in 4 students in Ohio were chronically absent from school.

This has been an issue for schools across the country, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 2021-2022 school year, 1 in 3 children were chronically absent from schools nationwide.

Some portion of those absences come for health-related reasons. So could school-based health services make a difference?

Thanks to a grant from the Ohio Department of Health, Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Health Partners of Western Ohio created a pilot program to find how School-Based Health Centers were helping keep kids in the classroom. This pilot was called the SBHC Saved Seat Time Pilot Project.

Nationwide Children’s has School-Based Health Centers (SBHC) in 17 schools in Franklin County, one in Richland County and one in Licking County. All provide primary care services in the schools themselves.

“We know that absenteeism impacts a child’s academic and general wellbeing,” said Natalie Zaborski, MPH, Quality Consultant for Nationwide Children’s Hospital. “We wanted to highlight how Nationwide Children’s presence in schools can impact school attendance, which then affects academic success and overall health.”

When there’s no SBHC on school grounds, a parent typically needs to leave work to pick up their child and take them to a primary care provider. It’s common for children not to return to school once they’ve been picked up from school grounds. But with a SBHC, most children can return to their class after just a 30-minute appointment.

The pilot program examined more than 4,000 appointments from November 2024 through May 2025. The data shows that SBHCs saved an average of three hours of classroom time per appointment.

“It did require some assumptions because we don't know what would have happened exactly if a child had left school grounds,” said Zaborski. “But 77% of children were returned back to the classroom after their appointment, which is significant.”

Now that the pilot program has established how the data is collected and parsed, Nationwide Children’s SBHCs will continue to collect this information in the hospital's electronic medical record (EMR).

Zaborski said the hospital plans to share this data with its partnering schools as well as building- and district-level attendance committees.

“We're looking at what this information can tell us,” she explained. “If a school is struggling with attendance, we can take a look at their cumulative saved seat time and see if there are opportunities to improve and help those children.”

Zaborski also said the program will be expanded to include students in the hospital’s transportation program.

“In the pilot, we only collected on patients who visited a clinic where they also attend school,” she said. “With our transportation program, students are bused from neighboring schools to one of our SBHC's. We know they're saving classroom time too but need to quantify it.”

Published September 2025