photo by: Joselyn King (file)

Ohio County Board of Education member Andy Garber takes a look at the X-ray machine on site during a celebration of the new health clinic for students at Madison Elementary School in September.

WHEELING — The new health clinic at Madison Elementary School will start seeing young patients as soon as school leaders have received consent forms signed by parents.

Packets containing the consent forms will be going home with students in the next few days, said Leah Stout, Ohio County Schools special education director.

She noted the ribbon was cut on the facility back in September and the facility is ready for patients.

“We just need to get the consents back, and we’ll be all ready to go,” she said.

The holdup had been the consent forms and policy between Ohio County Schools and WVU Medicine Wheeling Hospital, the medical provider for the clinic, according to Stout.

Last week, the Ohio County Board of Education agreed to tweak the policy pertaining to consent forms, she continued.

“When we originally created the policy for Ohio County Schools for the health and dental clinic, we were just starting to work with WVU Medicine and we were not aware of the consent forms they used,” Stout explained. “Once we started working with them, we learned of the forms they required and saw there was a lot of redundancy. We just had to go back and remove some of our forms.”

Providing health care at the clinic will be nurse practitioner Leah Thieman. Once the clinic is up and running, she will be there from noon to 3 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays.

If a child becomes sick at school and has not yet returned their consent form, there is a process in place to contact a parent to receive permission for the child to be treated, Stout said.

In November 2024, Ohio County Board of Education members approved a memorandum of understanding with WVU Medicine Wheeling Hospital to start a medical clinic at Madison Elementary School.

Under the policy, the clinic will start out by treating only students at Madison to initially avoid the privacy issues of treating older children.

The MOU states that WVU Medicine Wheeling Hospital will oversee the clinic and provide a nurse practitioner, who will be present at Madison School for a total of eight hours per week.