Mapping School Need Across Colorado

School-based health centers (SBHCs) are health care facilities located inside a school or on school grounds. They are staffed by multidisciplinary teams that commonly include medical and behavioral health providers, specialists, dental professionals, health educators, care coordinators, and health insurance enrollment specialists.

Some locations may have “school-linked” services in lieu of a full school-based health center. School-linked services are defined as smaller-scale programs delivered outside of a full-service, brick-and-mortar school-based clinic. These programs are intended to initiate services at the school — through methods such as telehealth, mobile units, or single providers — then provide a connection to a trusted community resource for medical-home services.

SBHCs serve students whose access to health care is limited, often due to systemic discrimination and marginalization, including students from families with lower incomes, students who are uninsured, and students whose families speak languages other than English. SBHCs are an important component of Colorado’s health care safety net.

This site features a map of SBHC locations across the state and an assessment of needs by school. This information allows users to see schools where students could benefit from an SBHC. The SBHC map includes sites with a physical location but does not include mobile clinics.

In the map below, view school-based health centers in your local area. Use the Search function to find a specific address or site across the state. To get more information about each SBHC, click on the purple button, activating the informational pop-up. The map below includes SBHC sites with a physical location at a school but does not include mobile clinics. The map represents SBHC sites operating as of November 2024.

This map showcases the school need index, an update from the first iteration published by the Colorado Health Institute in 2021. More detailed methods of how the index was developed are in the Methodology tab.

In the map below, use the Search feature to navigate to different parts of the state. Click on the magnifying glass icon to enter a county name, school name, or address to refine your search. When searching an address, sometimes the map will take you near, but not exactly to, a school or location. Zoom out to find the school you are looking for, which will appear as a colored dot.

The map also allows you to filter based on the relative need of the school and by school characteristics. Relative need is organized into five categories: lowest-, lower-, average-, higher-, and highest- need schools. Use the Filter by Relative Need option to toggle the relative needs of schools on and off.

Click on the school icon on the upper right-hand bar in the map to Filter by School Characteristic. This filter allows you to toggle between different characteristics of the school, including whether it is in a rural or urban area of the state, the percentage of students of color at the school, the size of its student body, and whether the school has access to school-based health care. Access to school-based health care includes a physical school-based health care clinic site, a mobile clinic, or virtual care offered by a SBHC.

The index draws on 17 indicators related to health outcomes and risk factors, health insurance coverage, access to and use of care, and student need. For each indicator, schools were assigned a score based on quartile related to that metric. Schools in the highest-need quartile were assigned a 4 and schools in the lowest-need quartile were assigned a 1.

A composite score was then calculated for each school using the weighted average of quartile scores across all indicators. Schools were then classified into one of five categories based on their performance across measures: highest need, higher need, average need, lower need, and lowest need.

For more information on the detailed methodology, click on the button below.