It was just a month ago that local and state officials huddled around Newtown Director of Health Donna Culbert as she deftly plied an oversized pair of ceremonial scissors to snip through a bow-bedecked red ribbon. It was the official opening of a school-based health center at the middle school. As public facility openings go, this one was much more than the usual brick-and-mortar add-on with which growing towns measure their affluence and/or resourcefulness. This school-based health center occupies a keystone position in the post-12/14 resolve of the town and state to knit up the raveled fabric of mental health assessments and services for children in the state, which failed with such devastating consequence in Sandy Hook.

In addition to providing on-the-spot information, education, and medical care, the health clinic at the middle school now serves as an access point for mental health services staffed by a licensed clinical social worker. Its creation was a critical component in plans by town and school officials to transition from the temporary ad hoc measures established in the wake of 12/14 to a state-sanctioned and supported source of standardized, consistent, and accessible mental health services for a population of students with a set of needs unlike any other school system in the state. It was a great and hopeful moment when the red ribbon dropped on March 13, and the health center opened. Then the details of Governor Dannel P. Malloy’s state budget emerged.

It turns out that the governor’s efforts to close projected budget deficits of $1.3 billion in the next fiscal year and another $1.4 billion the following year lean heavily on cuts to health care and social service programs. That includes a $2.27 million, 8.5 percent reduction in funding for school-based health centers over the next two years. The cuts could lead to reductions in hours of service and staffing, ultimately resulting in services for fewer students in the face of a growing need. Legislators on both sides of the aisle in Hartford are now formulating their responses to the Malloy administration’s budget with its long list of rescissions, but they are facing the same hard choices as the governor: where to cut, where to tax, what programs to short-change, who to anger.

When it gave its approval to the school-based health center last year, the Board of Education was told that the only costs to the school district would be “soft costs” associated with electricity and HVAC expenses; this was a state-financed operation. But as we discover with each new budget scrum in Hartford, few state-financed operations are sacrosanct. It could be that a state-funded health center in the middle school, despite our great expectation and hope for it, turns out to be just another temporary ad hoc measure. The town and school district should, in this first year, pay close attention to the health center’s efficiency and success since the day may come sooner rather than later when they are paying for it themselves.