LEWISTON — When classes start at Lewiston High School and Lewiston Middle School on Aug. 30, there will be counselors to provide mental health services but no nurse practitioner, the School Committee was told Monday night.

That means there will be no one who can write prescriptions, do a physical or provide other medical services.

That’s a worry for the students who have no primary care doctor, said City Councilor Kristen Cloutier, who serves on the School Committee.

“I have big concerns about that,” she said.

After the state budget was passed July 4, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services made cuts in the Fund for a Healthy Maine, which included 100 percent of the grant funding for school health centers, said Joan Churchill of Community Clinical Services, a nonprofit affiliated with St. Mary’s Health System.

Community Clinical Services provides services at Lewiston High School, Edward Little High School in Auburn, Lewiston Middle School and Auburn Middle School.

The grant money from the state for the four schools amounted to $200,000 a year, about 30 percent of the school clinic’s budgets, Churchill said. The rest of the costs are largely covered by families’ health insurance. Families without health care coverage aren’t charged.

Initially, school administrators expected to be asked by CCS to help pay to continue medical care. That possibility was on a list of how to spend some of the additional $2.1 million Lewiston schools received from the state budget for education.

But in a memo to Lewiston Superintendent Bill Webster, Churchill said after running the numbers, mental health treatment at the school clinics has held its own financially. The costs for that care are billed to students’ health insurances.

But there has not been a sustained, ongoing demand from students for medical care in school, Churchill wrote.

“Most students are physically healthy and require medical care for acute visits (cold, flu) that are not predictable,” she wrote.

Nurse practitioners did health risk assessments, but that doesn’t rise to the level of need for them to be at the schools, she said.

“At this time we will not be requesting a subsidy from the Lewiston School Department to continue services,” Churchill said.

The school nurses will be asked to work with clinic staff to see if there are ways to help students with medical needs. Churchill suggested the clinic could hold “immunization days” or “sports physicals days” when a doctor or nurse practitioner would be brought to the school clinic.

Another possibility is to treat students remotely.

“We are still considering different models of making our medical services available to students,” Churchill wrote.

Several School Committee members Monday night had concerns and questions. As the group was discussing emergency needs that would be covered by the extra state money, having no one at the school clinics to treat students who don’t have health insurance or a primary care doctor “rises to the level of emergency,” said Committee member Tom Shannon.

Committee Chairwoman Linda Scott asked Assistant Superintendent Shawn Chabot to schedule Churchill to attend a future meeting to get more details.

The Lewiston legislative delegation will be looking at ways to restore the cut, Scott said.

Last month state Sen. Nate Libby, D-Lewiston, said state legislators were not involved in the Fund for a Healthy Maine cut, and that it was a LePage administration decision that is “a major policy change that should have been vetted through a public process.”