School-Based Health Services and Adolescents’ Educational Outcomes: What Nationally Representative Data Can Tell Us about Service Provision and Impacts

Jane Rochmes, University of Michigan

This paper examines the link between school-based health services and educational outcomes. Research on health and education indicates that unhealthy students are poorly positioned to learn. By providing health-related services on campus, student health needs may be addressed without having to decrease time in school, potentially enhancing students’ opportunities to learn and leading to improved academic performance. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, I identify 15 different health services that schools may provide and descriptively compare schools that rank high and low on service provision along multiple school characteristics. I employ multilevel regression models to identify how the service provision aspect of school context relates to adolescents’ achievement. Further, I explore the existence of heterogeneous effects across subpopulations; I examine whether greater health service provision on school campus mitigates observed racial disparities in academic outcomes.