This story by Maryellen Apelquist was first published in the White River Valley Herald on Aug. 28.
In the 1990s, Frank Lamson, a newly credentialed pediatric nurse practitioner fresh off a stint at an urban school clinic in Massachusetts, came home to South Royalton with an idea: that such a clinic “would really be a good thing to have in a rural community.”
He shared that thought with friend and pediatrician Becky Foulk, who just a few years before had opened a private medical practice in town, and with whom Lamson worked. The doctor agreed, and it wasn’t long before the duo teamed with others, including local school nurses, to open HealthHUB, Vermont’s first school-based clinic.
Since then, 1995, the nonprofit clinic, funded with a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant channeled through the state Agency of Human Services, has operated in collaboration with the South Royalton Health Center to provide in-school medical care, mental health counseling, and a mobile dental program that expanded in 2009. What began as care for students in a handful of towns, South Royalton, Sharon, Tunbridge and Strafford, has grown to serve grade-schoolers and their families in a dozen communities across the White River Valley, from Brookfield to Stockbridge.
While all of HealthHUB’s services are in demand — the organization’s leaders report wait lists in some areas, including mental health care — the dental program is perhaps most widely recognized. Last school year, the dental clinic alone had about 400 patient visits.
Its signature silver-gray trailer with a large, smiling tooth on the side, outfitted as a dental office, can be spotted parked throughout the region, from the employee lot at Gifford Medical Center during the summer months to schools throughout the valley.
The hub’s first such trailer, purchased with a $95,000 grant awarded with the support of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., recently reached the end of its useful life as a clinic. It’s now parked in the lot of the town office in Royalton and used for storage.
Its successor, another silver gray unit, has been making the rounds, and Lamson eagerly reported that it is now joined by another vehicle in the HealthHUB fleet, a big rig named “Rosie.”
Tuesday, just one day before the start of school in the White River Valley, the nurse practitioner showed off 42-foot-long Rosie, a shiny motor home named for iconic Rosie the Riveter and built out with an interior to accommodate a comprehensive dental program.
Inside, HealthHUB, which has expanded in the last few years to also provide dental care to adults when school is not in session, provides a long list of services ranging from cleanings and exams to extractions, fillings, crowns, dentures and more.
Lamson himself flew to West Virginia to get Rosie, and drove the rig home to Vermont last fall. It cost $125,000 and came fully equipped with two dental chairs and all necessary office equipment, including a panoramic X-ray system.
“We had purchased that from the health department in Morgantown, [W.Va.],” Lamson said, explaining the branding wrapped around the vehicle that will be soon switched out to HealthHUB’s. “They got a big infrastructure grant from the feds to buy a brand-new one, but they had been using this as a mobile dental office for several years and wanted to sell it. And we were in the right position to acquire it.”
HealthHUB employs a fulltime dentist, dental hygienist, and dental assistant, and Foulk and Lamson are seeking another hygienist and others to join their health care team.
Hiring the full-time dentist, Colleen Anderson, two years ago, “was just a monumental step,” said Foulk.
“When she came onboard, we had been doing a little bit of work for adults with cleanings and stuff in after-school hours and during school vacations and over the summer, you know, that kind of thing. But we really expanded our dental services to offer full-service dentistry. And so we have quite a few adult patients now because there are a lot of adults who also receive benefits either under Medicaid or Medicare, or just are limited in their ability to travel places who utilize our services.”
Thirty years on, Lamson and Foulk’s vision—to provide access to health care services for children and their communities, where they are—remains as simple as it began.
“One of my mantras in establishing this thing has been to keep students in school and their parents at work,” Lamson said, “where kids at school could actually have medical care.”
For Foulk, the key to HealthHUB’s endurance has been its partnerships.
“That’s what this organization has been all about, building partnerships with other organizations to keep it going. So now we’re serving 12 different towns in eight locations,” Foulk said. “For instance, when we go to Randolph, we see kids from Brookfield and Braintree as well. They get bused in. It’s really grown.”
Community partners include Gifford Health Care, Chelsea Health Center, the town of Royalton and the region’s three school districts.
White River Valley nurse Susan Schuhmann, who’s worked at the school for 15 years, has long admired HealthHUB.
“It’s a great service for the community. The child doesn’t need to be pulled out of school early, missing schooltime to go to a doctor’s appointment. It can happen right here, then they’re back to class. And it does help parents who are working or who have transportation issues.”
While there is no celebration planned for HealthHUB’s 30th, Foulk said they could always use additional support, particularly with the uncertainty at the federal level concerning cuts to programs like Medicaid.
“We are trying to plan. It’s hard to know. And it’s hard to know how much the state of Vermont is going to step up and fill in the gaps, how much the state of Vermont will even be able to do that. So it’s hard to plan, but we’re trying to.”
Foulk noted efforts to increase fundraising in the communities served by HealthHUB, including by going, starting in 2026, to each of the annual town meetings “and making requests from every town that we serve, which we haven’t done in the past.”
HealthHUB accepts Vermont Medicaid and is an in-network Northeast Delta Dental provider. Foulk also noted that the team doesn’t “turn anyone away.”
“If somebody can’t pay, they don’t pay. And if they can just pay a little bit, there’s a sliding scale.”
Appointments with HealthHUB Dental Services may be made by calling 802-888-3384.
