Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust Fund

The Dental Foundation of North Carolina and the UNC-CH School of Dentistry have received a $228,000 grant, to be paid over a three-year period, from the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust. The grant will help fund the school's Dentistry in Service to Community Program (DISC).

The DISC program allows dental students to participate in extramural rotations in which they help provide preventative and restorative dental care to underserved populations in numerous dental clinics across the state of North Carolina. These underprivileged populations include low income, minority, disabled, aged and youth, and institutionalized patients.

The DISC program will introduce 150 future dentists to non-private practice dental careers primarily in North Carolina rural areas. Every year for the next three years a group of 50 dental students will be selected to perform extramural rotations with county health departments, community health centers and other state institutions.

"The DISC program will help further the school's mission to serve the people of North Carolina-- all of the people," Ron Strauss, chairman of the School's department of dental ecology, said. "It will further our efforts to broadly promote the health of the public."

Eugene Sandler, professor in the dental ecology department, who coordinates all extramural rotations at the School, said the grant would help both underprivileged citizens and the dental students serving those individuals. "The DISC program will help students with career planning and get them out in the real world sooner," he said. "It will provide more services by our students at those sites that serve needy citizens."

In the past, only senior students were required to complete extramural rotations. And by the senior year, many already hold concrete ideas about what they want to do upon graduation. Strauss, who is the principal investigator for the grant, said the added rotations would help guide younger students who have not yet formed those ideas. "It will expose students to underserved populations and encourage them to include disadvantaged persons in their future dental practices," he said.

Sandler personally interviews each student participating in the program and places him or her in a workplace that best suits his or her interests. A practicing dentist serves as faculty preceptor and monitors the student's performance in his or her designated site. Sandler said that over the last two years students' interest in the extramural program had grown exponentially, and the Kate B. Reynolds grant would provide the financial assistance needed to place more students.

"The grant will provide us with a win-win situation," Sandler said. "It will give me the ability to allow more students into the program and give those students the ability to see more patients."

The Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust was created in 1947 by the will of Mrs. William N. Reynolds of Winston-Salem. Three fourths of the income of the trust is designated for use for health-related programs and services across North Carolina and one fourth for the poor and needy of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County.

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