ABOVE: The Open Door Health Center inside Fairmont Elementary School will be closing September 30th, around a year after it first opened. Superintendent Andy Traetow said they will be looking into what to do with the unoccupied space.

FAIRMONT – Fairmont Area Schools Superintendent Andy Traetow announced at Tuesday’s school board meeting that Open Door Health Center (ODHC) will be closing its clinic in the elementary school on Sept. 30.

The clinic had opened at the beginning of last school year. The connection was initially established between the school and ODHC through the Minnesota School-Based Health Alliance in the spring of 2023.

At the time of opening, it was one of the first of its kind in greater Minnesota. Emily Heinis, with Communications and Marketing at ODHC, said at the time that most school-based health centers were located in the metro area.

“To have something in what classifies as rural and outstate is novel for Minnesota,” said Heinis at the time. “It happens in other places in the country. It’s very exciting for us and for the FQHC (federally qualified health center) community in Minnesota.”

Ultimately, Heinis said there were two main reasons ODHC pulled out of Fairmont. The first is inability to provide dental services, which was intended when the partnership first began.

“We would have loved to put dental in the building, which is what the district originally had as one of their main asks,” Heinis said. “The dental workforce issues, not just in Minnesota, not just in nonprofits, but across the dental workforce. It’s hard for us. We had to cease our regular mobile dental as well because we can’t. We are constantly hiring.”

This is an additional factor into the second reason, which is that there wasn’t enough utilization of the resource.

“The expectation of use did not match what turned out to be the case,” Heinis said. “We just weren’t seeing the number of patients necessary to make the costs feasible. We are employing a full time nurse practitioner. For her to not have a full schedule, it is just not very cost effective.”

Heinis said the experience was valuable given what they learned from it. They are continuing to look into similar ventures in other school districts. Heinis said they are not opposed to coming back if circumstances change.

Traetow said the school received notice around a month ago that ODHC would be ending its partnership with Fairmont and closing the clinic Sept. 30.

“We are extremely grateful for the opportunity to work with Open Door Health Center and their staff over the duration of the partnership,” he said. “We look forward to continuing to find new ways to support our students moving forward. Grateful for the opportunities that we had while their presence was here at the elementary school.”

Right now, Traetow said they are looking into how to best utilize the soon-to-be vacant space.

“After the students are out of the building [Sept. 30], they’ll come in and remove the pieces of equipment that they are responsible for,” he said. “We’ll have a space utilization conversation at a board committee in the future.”

For more information, call the district office at 507-238-4234 or Open Door Health Care at 507-344-5726.