Save-the-Date “Jack W. Gottschalk, D.D.S. Notable Service” Award Dinner

Francie is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati nursing program with BSN and master’s degrees, and she has been an outstanding nurse for more than 40 years. She has impacted clients, healthcare professionals, students, and the community. Francie was at University Hospital after graduation. She then held both a nursing clinical faculty and management position at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina.

She later relocated to Michigan and became an adjunct faculty at the University of Michigan and was System Leader for Education and Employee Development at Saint Joseph in Ann Arbor. Francie has also published numerous books, chapters and healthcare related articles and presented at national, regional, and local conferences.

Francie returned to Cincinnati and started a position as a senior program officer at Interact for Health. She was responsible for community health programs and later for school-based health center development over her twenty two years at Interact for Health (1999-2021) until her retirement in 2021.

She has received numerous awards, most recently the National School Based Health Alliance’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2023). In 2019, Francie received the Lifetime Achievement in Nursing Leadership Award from Mount St. Joseph University and was recognized as the nurse leader for the first Florence Nightingale Team Excellence in Nursing Award by the University of Cincinnati’s College of Nursing, where Francie earned her master’s degree. Under her leadership, Growing Well received the Florence Nightingale Team Excellence award in 2019.The University of Cincinnati’s College of Nursing, where Francie earned her master’s degree, recognized her for Outstanding Career Achievement in 2015 and named her a Distinguished Alumna in 1999.

School based health centers provide access to care for children and adolescents who have not been able to access care. Because the centers in the Cincinnati region have been developed as sustainable sites, they have become a reliable source of care for both students and community members. The centers are available to all children in their communities, including those experiencing homelessness; those in foster care; those who have entered the United States as unaccompanied minors; as well as children whose parents struggle with missing work when they must leave work for appointments for the needed medical visits.

Francie has advocated for funding for dental programs at Interact for Health by demonstrating the impact of successfully modeled dental services in schools. She worked collaboratively with others to leverage that funding with other sources of funding to achieve the inclusion of dental services in new and existing school-based health center sites.

In Cincinnati, the school based health center work focused on primary care initially but as the families identified unmet dental and vision needs, Growing Well began to work on identifying sources to fund the startup of dental and vision services. With Francie’s advocacy, Cincinnati has gone from very limited sources of dental care to five (and soon six) sustainable dental sites in Cincinnati Public Schools. The first site was Oyler Community Learning Center’s Delta Dental Center in 2013, and Aiken Dental was the last added in 2020. Roberts Academy will be the sixth site in Cincinnati Public Schools.

In addition, Francie has worked with multiple sites outside of the City to provide startup funding to expand and build comprehensive health services in schools. This expansion has included medical, dental and vision services at Fairfield School District, Hamilton School District, West Clermont School District, Middletown School District, Little Miami School District, Manchester Local School District, Braxton County Kentucky, and Mt Healthy Schools. The centers are taught sustainable models to ensure long term provision of care for students and their families. The school districts recognize the academic impact of meeting the health needs of students and the school-based health center work has become a strong partnership with the school districts.