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Southside Health Center To Open At Rickards High

Leon school and health officials discuss the launch of a new health center at Rickards High School (Feb. 2016)
Ashley Tressel
/
WFSU News

The Leon County School District is opening a new health center at Rickards High School. The district has partnered with Neighborhood Medical Center to provide healthcare for Southside families and students.

The district has partnered with Neighborhood Medical Center to provide healthcare for Southside families and students. Superintendent Jackie Pons says it will be open in the next sixty days.

“This is almost a $3 millon to $5 million  facility, so it’s really nice when you get inside, it’s just like Patients First, so we’ll have one of the finest healthcare facilities on the Southside that we could possibly have.”

Leon County has opened similar facilities in the past that closed due to loss of federal funding. But Pons says he’s not worried because it’s a private partnership.

“We’ve had community schools in Leon County for forty years, so that’s been going on quite a while," Pons says. "It’s a great concept, it’s a good concept, but what sometimes had happened in the past is they were funded on federal grants and when the federal grants ran out, it was hard to sustain it.”

Tallahassee City Commissioners Gil Ziffer and Scott Maddox have been trying to turn former Leonard Wesson Elementary into a community school that would also provide healthcare to the Southside. Pons, who joined the initiative, says they are still seeking funding. 

The district is also opening a food bank at Rickards.

Ashley Tressel is a senior Communication and English student at Florida State University. Before WFSU, she interned at the Executive Office of the Governor and The Borgen Project, a national nonprofit for global poverty. She also wrote freelance for Carbonated.tv, a multimedia news site and served as managing editor for the FSU International Programs magazine, Nomadic Noles, in Valencia, Spain. After graduation, Ashley plans to embark on her journalism career somewhere in Colorado.