By Shelby Gonzalez, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Across the country, children are stocking up on school supplies and teachers are preparing their classrooms and lesson plans. In addition to these traditional back-to-school activities, many school administrators and outreach groups are gearing up to raise awareness about the importance of health insurance and help families enroll in Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and health plans in the marketplace.
For decades, school leaders, community organizations, health care providers, and other civic groups have tried and tested a variety of school-based strategies, leaving a trail of lessons and best practices that groups can follow to help more families get health coverage. While school-based outreach can be time- and labor-intensive work, groups can employ a number of successful models.
Our new guide to school-based outreach shares strategies that experts across the country identified as important to their success. It describes lessons learned that can help groups engaging in school-based outreach avoid approaches that have yielded disappointing results. The guide also provides practical advice for launching programs and includes a set of key ingredients for success, including:
- Involving school leadership
- Conducting strategic outreach
- Providing application assistance
- Safeguarding privacy and confidentiality
- Having a realistic funding plan
Research shows that nearly half of the nation’s uninsured people who are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP live in families with at least one school-age child, making school-based outreach a high-value vehicle for reaching the nation’s remaining uninsured.
