The Kindergarten Oral Health Assessment - Senate Bill No. 379: PASSED!

This bill improves the current Kindergarten Oral Health Assessment, which aimed to ensure a dental check-up for all children by May 31st of their first school year in public school, at kindergarten or first grade. With the passing of this bill, participating schools must provide a form to students to take to their dentist who will perform the assessment and send the form back to school with the student for the schools to report the data. A major improvement with the passing of this bill is the need for schools to more closely collect and analyze the information that is collected from parents regarding their children’s caries experience, in order to then regularly report this information to the State Dental Director at the Department of Public Health.
Specifically, the additions to the Kindergarten Oral Health Assessment are:
  1. Adding a “caries experience” to the reported data
  2. Making on-campus assessments easier for schools to conduct by allowing passive consent for screening (similar to hearing and vision screenings)
  3. Streamlining data analysis by directing schools to report data directly to the State Dental Director at the Department of Public Health.
The passage of SB 379 allows for the creation of a strong statewide oral health surveillance system for California through enhanced collection and reporting of dental decay prevalence data in children. Through the mandatory report that schools must provide of their students’ caries experience, there is a greater sense of accountability placed on schools to track, maintain, and improve the oral health of their students. Additionally, by allowing passive consent for screening, schools will be able to identify a greater number of children who experience caries and thus increase the number of referrals of children to be seen by a dental professional. This ability to better detect and track the incidence and prevalence of children’s caries experience will allow for an ultimate decrease in the rate of dental caries in children.
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The hope is that the Kindergarten Oral Health Assessment will be adopted by other states as well, and it is exciting to see this necessary step finally passed towards the improvement of children’s oral health.
Press here to view the entire Senate Bill No 379.