Middletown City School District

Creating supports for student wellness, at school and at home

Middletown City School District is a proud urban district of 6,200 students located in Southwest Ohio. We are a high-poverty district working to deliver innovative urban opportunities and practices to our district to meet the diverse needs of all students. Through unique supports centered on student wellness at school and at home, we are taking an innovative approach to impact student learning.

To ensure we’re taking student wellness seriously across the district, part of our strategic plan focuses on student and family wellness. This focus helps us celebrate a belief in providing all students access to quality health care and healthy meals. This belief stems from the idea that, through wellness, we can provide greater access to learning and promote lifelong healthy living habits. By investing in student and family wellness, we can remove some of the non-cognitive barriers to learning in our district and improve students’ opportunities to access learning in the classroom.

One step in the process of addressing district-wide student and family wellness was finding a way to provide accessible health care for all students during and outside of the school day. To do this, the district opened a school-based health center with the purpose of keeping students in school and ready to learn. Students receive care during the school day, without requiring parents to leave work and lose wages. The center is open year-round and provides services to the entire community—not just the students from Middletown City Schools. By creating a school-based health center, we have been able to provide our school community with medical, dental, and vision services.