LoveLETTER Issue No. 59 • Summer 2015
Healthy Smiles Academy The Tooth Truck™ (our Ronald McDonald Care Mobile®) has been blessed with a grant of $183,561 from Missouri Foundation for Health to underwrite three years of growth for our onsite daily toothbrushing program! Over the past few years, the Tooth Truck and Springfield Public Schools have been working in partnership to introduce and fine-tune a daily tooth-brushing program for
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pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students. Thanks to the dedication of school leadership and staff, this extension of the Tooth Truck has been a great success and we are poised for growth and a formal launch of the program. Thanks to this generous grant, the brushing program has been formally named the “Healthy Smiles Academy” and we will add 800 kindergarten and pre-kindergarten children at Title I schools to our program each year for the PMS PMS 375 next116 three years, bringing our total participants to nearly 3,000! We are identifying a control group of
students whose dental health will be followed throughout the three years of the MFH grant period. To help accommodate this growth, Alise Deines has joined our team as the Healthy Smiles Academy Manager. For 13 years, the Tooth Truck has helped 18,000 children through 44,200 dental appointments, providing over $10.5 million in dental treatment for low-income children that have no transportation or means to acquire care. Our 200-sqPMS 298 clinic provides PMS a2577 ft mobile full range of dental services and our goal is to complete every child’s CONTINUED ON PAGE 11
Premier Red Shoe Gala Price Cutter Charity Championship presented by Dr Pepper
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Paint It Forward RMHCozarks.org
The Healthy Smiles Academy gives kids the opportunity to practice good brushing habits every day at school, working towards a lifetime of cavity-free smiles. These children from Cowden Elementary School in Springfield brush every day after lunch.