The good news is that the Sarrell Dental Clinic in Talladega will not be greatly affected by the loss of students from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. UAB announced on Monday that it had ended its $400,000 contract with Sarrell and was withdrawing its students from the Anniston and Bessemer clinics. In those offices, UAB students honed their skills under the supervision of professional dentists while performing an invaluable service to their communities. The Talladega clinic did not employ any UAB students, so it will suffer less of the impact.

The bad news is that the Talladega clinic, and Sarrell’s seven other clinics across Alabama, will be hampered in varying degrees in their ability to provide dental care to children whose parents do not have dental insurance and cannot afford private dentists. The Talladega clinic shares a group of dentists with several other Sarrell offices, and the rotation is likely to tighten up as the dentists struggle to meet the demand without the help of the students.

Sarrell is one of two dental offices that accepts Medicaid patients in Talladega, and it treats only children and teenagers. It is a statewide nonprofit organization that has provided dental care to 130,000 patients in its eight offices since it was founded in 2005.

A Pew Center of the States report that came out in February showed that a higher percentage of children with Medicaid got dental care in Alabama than in other states. Alabama was one of only three states in which more than half of all children enrolled in Medicaid received dental care in 2007. The availability of treatment at the Sarrell clinics has to be a large part of the reason.

UAB has its own reasons for withdrawing its students from the nonprofit clinics. We suspect the profits of its alumni figure greatly in that decision.