This $480,000 gift will expand a popular CBC program
When he was a young child, Juan Sencion was fascinated by dentistry and decided someday he wanted to work in a dentist’s office.
“I always loved going to the dental office for my appointments,” said Sencion, whose parents were diligent about making sure he got routine dental cleanings. “It was really interesting to me ... how the teeth work, how they function and how they affect our overall health.”
Sencion, a Columbia Basin College dental hygiene student who is now approaching graduation, moved from Wenatchee to get one of a coveted 18 spots in the college’s bachelor’s degree program.
Columbia Basin College officials and leaders from the Rural Families Educational Fund have now announced a $480,000 grant that will expand the program to more students.
Most of the money, $320,000, is paying to move the program to new digs on the third floor of the Richland Medical Science Center on Northgate Drive. The change will nearly double the teaching space and allow at least four more students to attend.
The change can’t come soon enough for students still trying to get into a dental hygiene program. The college sorts through between 50 and 60 qualified applicants each year, said Tammy Sanderson, the program’s director.
“Students come from all across the state, and some come from out of the state,” she said. “CBC has built a reputation for having a successful dental hygiene program, so we have a lot of interested applicants.”
From helping migrant children to helping migrant families
Along with helping bring in more students, the expansion will help more low-income adults and children get care. Presently, the students help for more than 2,700 people each year. That number is expected to increase to more than 4,500 patients.
The students also reach out to low-income and migrant communities to educate them about oral health.
The remainder of the grant, $160,000, will fund both the oral health care services and education efforts in low-income and migrant communities. .
Sencion, the child of migrant workers, said some of his favorite work for the program was researching how to help migrant families at a local farm.
For Terry Marie Fleischmann it completes a circle that started with a desire to help migrant families working in Benton and Franklin counties more than four decades ago.
At the time, a group of people started helping the children of migrant families after seeing them brought into the fields, she said. The group became the Mid-Columbia Coalition for Children, but as state and federal money for the project faded and they lost one of their main ways to raise funds, the program shut down.
After selling the property they owned, the group turned into the Rural Families Education Fund, which Fleischmann chaired. Since 2012, it has been funding various projects throughout the region.
They were holding onto the last $480,000 while they looked for a final project before closing the fund. Fleischmann found it with the CBC dental hygiene project.
“I’m here to applaud you, she told CBC officials, “because this is the perfect place for these monies, and it’s going to carry on for a very, very long time.”