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News : February 2009

High school students watch, mystified, as Susan Purcell lays out props for her Smiles for Teens presentation; a canister of sugar, empty beverage containers, a giant toothbrush, a set of huge, fake teeth and some not-so-healthy-looking real ones.

Susan, a dental hygienist, uses a show-and-tell style to engage students with visual and written material as she tells them the truth about teeth.

She uses fake teeth and the oversized toothbrush to demonstrate proper brushing, and talks about fluoride and other improvements in dental care. “There is no reason why any of you shouldn’t be able to keep your own teeth,” she tells them.

Next come the beverage bottles and the sugar. As a student reads a label on a twelve-ounce can of cola, and tells the class that it contains 40 grams of sugar, Susan demonstrates that 40 grams is equal to ten teaspoons.

Susan shows students how tobacco, lack of dental care and poor dietary habits may cause dental diseases, infections and disfigurement. She also tells them how a program of dental care and hygiene reduces those risks and supports physical health, self-esteem and general well-being.

The program encourages teens who have no access to dental care to use the CDHP mobile dental clinic. The clinic comes right to the schools, and is already serving many elementary school students who are under or uninsured, yet some teens don’t want to use it, and refer to it as, “the baby bus.” But as one high school student commented, “I toured the clinic and the inside is nothing like the outside, it’s a regular dentist’s office. You have to look inside, not the outside, like with a book.”

By the numbers, Smiles for Teens works; of the 262 youth who participated during the last school year, 175 improved their dental education by 67 percent as measured by surveys and verbal responses during the workshops/presentations. And Susan is an effective ambassador; students from one school district gave her a thank-you poster signed by more than 100 students. “And students come up to me, saying things like, ‘I brush and floss now,’” she says with a grin.

Smiles for Teens is an initiative of the PRASAD Children’s Dental Health Program, funded in part by grants from the New York State Office of Children and Family Services and the Sullivan County Youth Bureau.