We recruited a total sample of 2313 children from 59 sites (7 Women, Infants, and Children centers, 10 Head Start preschools, 21 elementary schools, and 21 high schools) to represent disadvantaged children in Los Angeles County. Of them, 1495 students were elementary and high school students,with their parents indicating that 6.4% of the parents and 5.5% of the children missed school days or workdays because of their children’s dental problems. We excluded children aged 2 to 5 years from this analysis because they did not have academic records. We retrieved and included the academic records of 629 children from LAUSD (considered the LAUSD subsample) in the analyses. These academic records represented 87% of all the LAUSD elementary and high school students enrolled in the study who, with their parents, consented to the re- lease of these records (720 gave permission, but not all records were retrievable from the school district). Approximately half of the children in this LAUSD subsample were boys (45%), 10% Asians, 24% Blacks, and 66% Hispanics(Table 1).About 73% of the children lived in homes with household family incomes of less than $35000. Both parents of about one third of the children had less than a high school education. About 36% of the children lived in a home where English was not spoken at all, and 15% were born outside the United States (data not shown). In the total subsample, the prevalence of cavitated caries was 40%, and the prevalence of cavitated or white lesions (noncavitated caries) was 69%. Nineteen percent of the children had a toothache in the past 6 months, 22% had dental needs but could not access dental care in the past year, and 8.5% needed immediate dental care (data not shown). These results from the LAUSD sub- sample are similar to the results from the complete sample (LAUSD or non-LAUSD).2