On Friday August 22nd, Northwood High School’s SBHC held an open house for its staff and teachers. The wellness center open house included healthy snacks, blood pressure screenings, acupuncture demos,  tours of the wellness center, and chair massages. Over 40 Northwood staff and teachers attended with over 20 staff receiving acupuncture demos and 11 attendees receiving chair massages. The open house provided the SBHC with the opportunity to discuss their services with teachers and staff.

Azim Ross works in the Northwood High SBHC as part of the Pride Youth Services division, and had this to say about teacher and staff involvement to promote the SBHC:

We absolutely need the teachers [to promote the wellness center] because not only do they have access to the students that need the services. We need the teachers to have the long term relationships with the students. Its great that Northwood teachers are so open to the helping us promote the wellness center.

Wellness center and teachers and staff make a great team for reaching the students in need for services. Northwood’s open house was a great success and addressed not only the needs of the attendees but also what they could do to help Northwood students be healthier. Northwood High’s SBHC open house was made possible through the Hallways to Health Initiative.

Love what Northwood did?? Here are some tips to publicize your SBHC:

• Present at a school orientation meeting
• Invite staff for a SBHC tour and provide refreshments.
• Meet with school counselors, social workers, and school nurses
• Ask the school principal for a bulletin board to advertise the SBHC
• Give teachers posters about the SBHC for their classrooms
• Present at a Parent Night and have a table at Freshman Orientation
• Advertise to students with morning announcements, tables at lunch, or during Division or Home Room
• Reach out to the Athletic Director and coaches and ask that their teams register at the SBHC for sports physicals
• Take 10 minutes each day to walk around the school. This allows students and teachers to see you outside of the SBHC and as part of the school
• Eat lunch in the teacher’s lounge – be ready to talk about the SBHC with interested teachers!

Looking for more resources? You can find a ton of resources at the Alliance for Healthier Generation and the Thriving Schools websites.

 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  recently released a toolkit on the connection between health and academic achievement and what stakeholders can do to emphasize this positive connection.  Health and Academic Achievement is a toolkit that can be a very valuable resource for both schools and teachers as it details the crucial link between a student’s health and its impact on their academic achievement. The toolkit was created by public health  and education professionals to emphasize the link between healthy eating, physical activity, and improved academic achievement  and what stakeholders can do to create healthy school environments.

The toolkit focuses on four areas:

1. Provides evidence linking healthy eating and physical activity with academic achievement
2. Provides evidence driven messages that are specific to certain stakeholders
3. Provides specific and feasible action steps that can be used to support healthy eating and physical activity in schools
4. Highlights additional resource that can be utilized to further support your action steps.

Evidence of the link between health eating and physical activity and students academic achievement include:

• Student participation in the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) School Breakfast Program (SBP) is associated with increased academic grades and standardized test scores, reduced absenteeism, and improved cognitive performance (e.g., memory)
• Lack of adequate consumption of specific foods, such as fruits, vegetables, or dairy products, is associated with lower grades among students.
• Hunger due to insufficient food intake is associated with lower grades, higher rates of absenteeism, repeating a grade, and an inability to focus among students
• More participation in physical education class has been associated with better grades, standardized test scores, and classroom behavior (e.g., on-task behavior) among students.
• Time spent in recess has been shown to positively affect students’ cognitive performance (e.g. attention, concentration) and classroom behaviors (e.g., not misbehaving).

The biggest takeaway from the toolkit that will the most useful for SBHC’s include the toolkits core messages and how  best to communicate them to those stakeholders you are trying to influence:

Cores Messages:

1.  Healthy students are better learners:  Healthy students are better on all levels of academic achievement: academic performance, education behavior, and cognitive skills and attitudes
2. Schools can influence eating and physical activity behaviors:  Students spend much of their time at school, and may eat as many as 2 out of 3 meals per day and may get much of their physical activity at school
3. Healthy, successful students help build strong communities: Investing in the health of students contributes to healthy communities in the future.
4.  All students deserve the opportunity to be healthy and successful:  Providing access to healthy foods and physical activity plays an important role in the academic achievement of students.

The toolkit emphasizes using different messages when communicating to different audiences at both the states and local levels and to incorporate at least 1-2 messages in all communication to support both healthy eating and physical activity strategies in schools, this includes communication in all forms such as conversation, PowerPoints, Webinars, meetings, presentations, Web content, e-mails, newsletters, print documents.

Click here to explore the rest of  toolkit