Funding to end for UConn minority dental program

Byline

FARMINGTON, Conn. — A five-year private grant that helps the University of Connecticut Health Center recruit more minority dental students is about to expire, and the program’s director has vowed to find other funding sources to keep it afloat.

The program, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, gives black and Latino college students extra help to pass the dental school admission test and go on to graduate. The grant expires this summer. Similar programs were offered at 14 other dental schools around the country.

Before 2002, the first year of the grant, about 6 percent of students accepted yearly at the dental school were black, Latino or Native American. Last year, the rate was 20 percent.

Dr. Cynthia Hodge, an associate dean at the UConn Dental School, was hired four years ago to run the minority student program. She said she believed then the Health Center was committed to sustaining the program after the grant runs out Aug. 31.

If no private money is found, her job will be eliminated.

“The students I work with, there isn’t going to be anybody to help them,” Hodge said.

Hodge knows personally how valuable such a program can be. She became a dentist after dropping out of high school, becoming a teenage mother and working as a telephone operator. She said there are no programs like hers that take inadequately prepared students and turn them into dentists.

She vowed to spend the rest of the school year applying for grants to sustain the program. She estimated the cost at no more than $250,000 a year.

Dr. Monty MacNeil, dean of the dental school, said that the university never planned to cover the program’s cost after the grant ran out.

“The project was created on the premise that this would be a five-year project that was independently funded,” MacNeil said last week.

He said the lack of future university funding for the program was not related to a budget deficit at the Health Center that could reach $20 million in two years without more money from the state.

The program was part of an effort to improve dental care for blacks and Latinos by increasing the number of minority dentists. Because so few dentists in Connecticut accept state Medicaid payments, only about one-third of low-income children get the regular dental care.

MacNeil said the school will still be able to continue much of the grant’s mission. Fourth-year dental students now spend about one-third of their clinical training in community health centers. The UConn-funded program called the Health Professions Partnership Initiative, which encourages promising minority students to enter the health professions, will continue, MacNeil said.

(Associated Press)