School Puts Emphasis on Help Beyond the Classroom : Ventura: At the poorest campus in the district, free individual and family therapy is provided along with immunizations, checkups and clothing.

In the space of just one week last spring, Sheridan Way School Principal Trudy Arriaga got three visits from parents seeking help.

Nothing unusual about that, except these parents were not asking how to get their children to study more or behave better in class.

One distraught mother asked Arriaga for help getting the local utility companies to turn her family’s gas and electricity back on.

Another brought in divorce papers that her husband had just filed and which she could not understand because they were in English. And the third said she needed to find Alcoholic Anonymous meetings for her husband.

Arriaga helped all three.

At Sheridan Way, the poorest school in the Ventura Unified School District, Arriaga and her staff members believe they can only expect children to succeed in the classroom if they help them to thrive outside of school.

This year, Sheridan Way in west Ventura has become the first school in the district and one of the first in the county to bring nurses and other medical workers on campus to administer shots and physical checkups to neighborhood children up to 18 years old.

A county mental health counselor also comes to the school twice a week to give free individual and family therapy.

And the school operates a clothes closet jammed with hundreds of donated shirts, coats and shoes that are given free to children’s families.

The next step, Sheridan Way officials say, is to soon bring a county social worker to the school to help parents get other public services.

“The children at our school don’t have telephones to call doctors,” Arriaga said. “They don’t have cars to get to clinics. They don’t have parents who speak English who are able to be their advocates.”

School district officials could say “tough luck,” Arriaga said. “But then what happens is the child isn’t able to be successful in school.”

Of the roughly 500 kindergarten-through-fifth-grade students at Sheridan Way, half have only limited English. About 50 of the children come from families that are homeless. And 99% are poor enough to qualify for federally subsidized lunches.

Most of the parents have jobs. Some work at local fast-food restaurants, in small factories or in agriculture, teacher Susan Eberhart said.

“But they are barely making enough to support their families,” she said. “These are working people who do not have health insurance.”

In a survey last year of Sheridan Way families, school officials found that only 10% are insured either through Medi-Cal or private plans.

And while nearly all the families qualify for welfare, only 8% receive it, officials said. Many immigrant parents are too frightened of the questions that government officials may ask on immigration status to go to public agencies for help--even though many of them have U.S.-born children, Eberhart said.

But many of these same parents feel comfortable coming to Sheridan Way.

“People have come here that wouldn’t go other places,” Eberhart said. “We’re safe.”

The school is not only welcoming to parents, it is close to their homes.

Without insurance or the money to pay for medical care, many Sheridan Way families tend to postpone medical care until minor complaints become major maladies, Eberhart said.

More than one Sheridan Way child has suffered a broken eardrum caused by an untreated ear infection, she said.

Others come to school severely nearsighted but with no eyeglasses, with rotting teeth and no dental care or without having been immunized against mumps and other childhood diseases.

Beginning last spring, nurses and medical workers from county Public Health Services have operated a clinic every two weeks in a back room at the school.

Although the county pays upfront for the service, it is reimbursed by the state so long as the clinic draws enough patients. And public health officials said that so far they have had no trouble attracting enough patients.

More than a dozen parents and children filled the clinic room Wednesday.

In addition to giving immunizations and testing for anemia and other health problems, the medical workers also check the children’s teeth, eyesight and hearing. Treatment is covered under the state-funded program.

Ernestina Villegas came to the clinic Wednesday with her third-grade daughter Belen because she was concerned about a rash on the girl’s ankle.

But both the girl and the mother were relieved to learn from pediatric nurse Linda McDermott that the itchy rash was just spider bites.

McDermott explained to Villegas various ways to prevent bites, such as keeping the ceiling around Belen’s bed cleared of webs.

And she also prescribed hot compresses and a medicated cream.

“We’re going to fix her up,” the nurse said.