The School-Based Health Initiative supports quality, convenient health care for students and their families in a safe, familiar place. Providing health services in school settings helps kids miss less school and focus on learning.
Montana Healthcare Foundation provides grants and technical assistance to help schools and health care providers begin providing health services in schools. “School-based health care” refers to services provided in or near a school through a partnership with a local health care organization. MTHF supports partnerships between schools and rural health centers, tribal clinics, urban Indian organizations, federally qualified health centers, and other providers. The specific health services provided are based on each community’s needs and resources, and may include primary care, behavioral health, dental, and/or vision. Care can be provided inside a school, on a school campus, in a mobile unit on a school campus, or through telehealth.
Providing school-based health care:
School-Based Health Initiative One-Pager
INITIATIVE PROGRESS
MTHF launched the School-Based Health Initiative in 2020. We provide grant funding to schools and health care providers to cover startup costs, and technical assistance to support planning and development of new school-based health services.
As of 2025, the School-Based Health Initiative has supported the startup or expansion of 82 school-based health care sites that serve 132 of the state’s highest need schools.
Visit our Grant Library to learn more about each initiative project.
IMPACT STORY
Hear from students across Montana about how school-based health services have helped them stay in school and thrive.
STATE-WIDE LANDSCAPE OF SCHOOL-BASED HEALTH
In 2025, we collaborated with the School-Based Health Alliance to conduct a landscape analysis of school-based health in Montana. The goals of the landscape analysis were to: 1. Capture the current landscape of school-based health care sites and services in Montana; 2. Develop a better understanding of current collaborations between schools and health care organizations; 3. Develop recommendations to support the growth and sustainability of school-based health care in Montana. Through the analysis we learned that there are at least 82 school-based health care sites in Montana operated by at least 24 healthcare organizations. The full analysis can be found here and the one-page overview can be found here.
Our Support
We support partnerships between schools and health care providers to create school-based health services in schools that need them most. We provide grants to develop new and expand existing school-based health programs and technical assistance to each grantee.
Funding is available for both health care organizations and school districts. For more information on participating in the initiative, please contact our program team.
Convening
We convene the School-Based Health Leaders as a first step to establishing an association that will serve as a backbone organization supporting school-based health across the state over the long term.
We also convene an annual gathering of stakeholders in school-based health to support peer engagement and provide learning opportunities.
Related
Contact
If you have a question about this initiative, please email our program team.