The district had been promoting an attendance campaign called “Five or Less,” encouraging families to strive for no more than five absences per school year. But it was clear that encouragement alone was not enough. There were too many other barriers that LESD students faced, and a big one was access to health care.

“I knew what these families were going through,” Gonzalez said. “I remember growing up as an immigrant child, and you either went to work anyway, or you waited until you were really sick. My parents worked in the fields, and they couldn’t afford to miss work to take us to the doctor.”

While the small community of Lamont does have some primary care services, LESD families still face significant barriers accessing care. In 2023, a Kern County Public Health Report found that “provider shortages result in high turnover rates and discontinued care. Therefore, residents often face long wait times that exacerbate health issues and must often travel up to two hours into a major city to receive the care they need.” For families without reliable transportation, these barriers become even more significant.

These issues brought to mind for Gonzalez a grant-funded initiative that she had put in place during her superintendency with the El Nido Elementary School District. There, a medical doctor visited the small rural district once a week to deliver primary care to her students. Could something like that work in Lamont?

“I literally whispered it to my Family Resource and Learning Center director one day and said, ‘We should try to do that here,’” Gonzales said. “Just as a dream.”

But that whisper was the start of something more. Family Resource and Learning Center (FRLC) Director Jennifer Wood-Slayton, whose professional background is in community development, was eager to take the idea and run with it. With the support of the board of trustees, slowly, the dream started to take shape.

A combination of luck and perseverance brought the district into contact with Telehealth Docs, a provider of telemedicine providing specialty care for patients in rural Kern County and beyond. Where others had said it was impossible, Telehealth Docs was encouraging.

“Finally, we found someone who said, ‘Yeah, we can do it,’” Gonzalez said. And LESD got one step closer to making the dream a reality.

The path forward to creating telehealth centers at each of the district’s four schools was not always easy. District leaders had to navigate memorandums of understanding to make our partnership a reality. They needed to carefully review the legal and privacy considerations that could arise from delivering health care inside our school buildings to our minor students. And they had to ensure that the cost for this new service would not be a burden to either our district or our students’ families.

But perseverance paid off. The district worked with Telehealth Docs to ensure that Medi-Cal and other insurance partners could be billed for services delivered to LESD students. Telehealth offices were equipped with sinks and other modest but necessary supplies. Funding for the project — about $45,000 for equipment, training and other expenses — came from a California Community Schools Partnership Program grant, so no regular district funds were used to launch the project.

In February of this year, Gonzalez and Wood-Slayton stood alongside members of the district’s board of trustees to cut the bright red ribbon on the region’s first school district telehealth network.

“This telehealth network is a game-changer for our students,” Board President Ernesto Garay said. “Our families almost can’t believe it when we tell them, ‘Yes, your child can just come right into school and the doctor will see them.’ It’s really that easy.”

In just a few short months since the program’s debut, the LESD Telehealth Network has made a positive impact for students, families and the district. A trip to the telehealth office is now no different than a trip to the school nurse, so that students miss a minimum amount of class time and can still be counted as present. And families no longer have to choose between earning a paycheck or caring for their sick child.

“Where before, the student might say, ’I don’t want to go to school today,’ now their parents can say, ‘Let’s see what the doctor says,’” Gonzalez explained. “And half the time, the doctor will say, ‘He’s fine, he can stay right here at school.’ So, the child gets to continue their learning and the family knows they are OK.”

As exciting as it has been to make the Telehealth Network dream a reality, Gonzalez isn’t done dreaming. Her next goal is to increase the district’s ability to support students’ mental and emotional health as well as their physical health.

“We want to get to the point where we can normalize the fact that it’s OK to talk about mental health,” Gonzalez explained. “It’s a huge conversation for us to be able to have. So hopefully that’s the next big thing.”