State cuts oral health services in Orange County

The state is pulling thousands of dollars in oral health services funding out of Orange County, and elementary school students could feel the pain.

Because the state health director was faced with budget cuts, the county will lose its public health dental hygienist as well as programs aimed at reducing dental disease in county students.

Mike Kelley, chairman of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education, gave the news to Orange County Commissioners at a Sept. 23 meeting with the county’s two school districts.

“They chose several counties they felt were high-wealth and stopped all services,” Kelley said at the meeting. “We’re one of those counties.”

Rebecca King, chief of the state’s oral health section, said the N.C. health director was charged with eliminating $900,000 in positions, and the oral health section was chosen to bear the brunt of the cuts.

“He went to us because we do have a higher percentage of state appropriations,” King said. “It’ll reduce our services by close to 20 percent.”

The oral health section will lose eight positions, two of which remain vacant from summer retirements.

As a result, state oral health services will end in the coming weeks for 11 counties, including Orange.

“Orange County tends to come out as one of the lower-need counties,” said King, who added staff members looked at factors like dental disease levels, the dentist to population ratio and median family income.

Dental screenings usually are conducted for kindergartners and second-, fourth- and fifth-graders who attend public schools in the county.

“With that program, we would identify children who were in need — who had dental decay — and alert the parents,” said Wendy Schwade, Orange County’s current public health dental hygienist.

Schwade said this and other data, like children who have never had dental decay or children successfully treated for dental disease, will no longer be collected for the county or included in state records.

And King said the loss of data for the county affects more than state number-crunching.

“As far as the number of kids that are identified in needing care, we won’t know because we don’t have those statistics,” she said.

Schwade said she will soon leave her Orange County post for a relocated position covering Granville, Vance and Franklin counties.

King said the current state dental hygienist covering those counties was released from her position on the basis of “last hired, first fired.”

“She was a wonderful employee, but she was the junior person,” King said.

Debbie Piscitelli, a school board member for Orange County, said she understands the need for the cuts but sees the consequences it could have for students.

“I just think that we’re going to have a lot of students that aren’t going to get the oral care that they need,” she said.

Contact the City Editor at citydesk@unc.edu.