CHINATOWN : Medical Services at Castelar School

Castelar Elementary School has received its first installment of a $400,000 state grant to bring medical, dental and mental health services for low-income families to the school and the surrounding neighborhood.

According to school officials, the $100,000 installment will be used to help purchase a dental chair for the Chinatown Service Center and to convert a vacant kindergarten classroom at the school into a parent center with services that will include medical and dental screenings, counseling and educational seminars.

The school, at 840 Yale St., will receive $400,000 over three years through the state Healthy Starts program, which aims to provide social services at schools as a centralized and convenient option for low-income families. Castelar is one of five Los Angeles County schools to receive the grant to provide on-site services.

The Chinatown Service Center, the Asian-American Drug Abuse Program, the county Department of Children’s Services’ Asian Pacific Project and the county Probation Department’s Asian Gang Unit will provide drug and mental health counselors, doctors, nurses, dental hygienists and gang experts to offer families bilingual assistance in Chinese, Vietnamese and Spanish at the parent center.

Castelar already has an on-going referral relationship with those and other agencies under which teachers and administrators watch for problems and direct students and their families to appropriate services, officials said.

But Castelar Principal Dore Wong wanted to help local families, many of whom are recent immigrants, even more by providing services within walking distance and in languages they could understand.

In applying for the state grant, Wong and Larry Lue, Chinatown Service Center’s counseling program director, said they stressed the need for bilingual services, including drug and gang activity prevention, dental care, and counseling and parent education.

Dental care is often neglected by local families, either because of cost or a reluctance to go to doctors outside of Chinatown, Wong said. Of 160 sixth-graders checked last year during routine screenings at Castelar, 110 needed some type of dental work, Wong said.

To address that problem, a portion of the grant will go toward installing a dental chair at Chinatown Service Center’s facility at 600 N. Broadway. Lue said the chair will not be in place until at least next year because remodeling work must be done at the center first.