ASCD's Health in Education Initiative: School-Community Partnerships for Problem-Based Learning

Presenters: Theresa C. Lewallen, ASCD, Alexandria, VA; Leslie Bickett, Judy Martin, Cassidy Williamson, Katie Everly, Crystal Cox, Andy Vandiver, McLean County High School, McLean County, KY; Julie Gast, Utah State University, Logan, UT

This session is presented in separate parts. Use the buttons at the end of the transcription to navigate between each part.

III. Community Health Leadership — McLean County, Kentucky

THERESA LEWALLEN: I'm now going to introduce a group, a panel in and of itself, from McLean County, Kentucky, and as they speak they'll introduce themselves. We have the teacher of the class, the youth resource coordinator, and four students. So I'm very pleased to have them here and I will ask them to say their names before they speak.

LESLIE BICKETT: Thank you, Theresa. My name is Leslie Bickett, and I'm co-project director of the McLean County, Kentucky, Project. I have with me the teacher of the class, Judy Martin, she's handling our transparencies today. I have four students with me also — Cassidy Williamson, Katie Everly, Crystal Cox, and Andy Vandiver. I'd also like to introduce you to the rest of our class. This picture was taken right outside our local health department, the McLean County Health Center, and we had been there that day for a tour of the Health Center.

I want to tell you just a little bit about our county and our school district. We come from a very small agricultural and rural community. Our county is not only small geographically, but population-wise. We have less than 10,000 people total in our county. All our schools in the county are public schools. They're all small. We have three elementary schools. One of those elementary schools has fewer than 100 students in it. We have one middle school and one high school. The middle school and high school sit right next to each other in the center of the county in our county seat, Calhoun. Our total population for the high school is about 475 students.

Now a little bit about our school day. Our school, a high school, is based on block scheduling. And that means they have four classes per day, per semester, and each class lasts about 90 minutes. In the last seven years we have had 72 changes in staff, and we think that's probably due to the low pay scale in comparison with the surrounding school districts. We have low parental involvement. Our dropout rate, as of January, was 1.6 percent, and in the last school year the overall dropout rate was 6.9 percent — and this is one of the highest in our state. We have 35 percent of our students receiving free or reduced lunches.

Our project is a cooperative effort between the Green River District Health Department and the McClean County School District. This project offered 11th to 12th grade students a one-semester family and consumer science course titled Community Health Leadership. Through formal instruction and hands-on experience, students developed the basic concepts of public health. In addition, they developed problem-solving and critical thinking skills that are necessary for informed decision-making concerning the health of their community. Topics that we covered in this class included: An Introduction to Public Health, Public Health Issues and Careers, The Environment, Tobacco Use, Teen Sexuality, Alcohol and Other Drugs, Nutrition, and Leadership. Grading criteria for the class included tests, written assignments, labs, conduct on field trips, and group presentations. In addition to all these regular class assignments, all students were required to provide a minimum of 10 hours of services to their community and they also had to create and implement one educational activity that was related to one of the topics of study.

Titles for this year's projects included: "Alcohol, Can You Handle It?" — and this was presented to our middle school health classes; "Operation: Drug Bust" — and this was presented to our 7th grade science classes; "You Are What You Eat" — and this was presented to our 3rd grade elementary school students in two of our elementary schools; "Hand-washing is Cool" — and this was presented to Head Start and kindergarten students in two of our elementary schools; and then "Don't Be a Victim — Date Rape and Date Rape Drugs" — and this was presented in our 9th grade health classes and then we had several upperclassmen to attend these presentations also.

Here are some pictures from our projects. "Alcohol, Can You Handle it?" In this picture we have our students trying to demonstrate what it would feel like to be drunk, and so they put these big, heavy gloves on their hands and put Vaseline on the glasses, and then they had to walk around the gym. "Don't Be a Victim — Date Rape and Date Rape Drugs" — you can see Andy in that picture. "Hand-washing is Cool." "Operation: Drug Bust." Three of the students who are here with me today were in that group. You can see Katie teaching the 7th grade science class. And then "You Are What You Eat." That team talked about the food pyramid. And there's Darren talking to the kids about reading food labels.

Now Judy's going to talk to you all about the classroom strategies that were employed in this course.

JUDY MARTIN: They also looked at team-building skills. We also looked at writing assignments or portfolios — that is required in our school district and in our state. Students are required to do one per nine weeks. We did more than one per nine weeks. The students focused on personal leadership skills. They also wrote news articles for a local paper. They wrote letters, they wrote thank you notes, they wrote skits for kindergarten for their projects, they used email, they used memos to administrators in teachers in setting up their projects — I didn't set up their projects, they had to do all the contacts for that. They also wrote project reports and reflections. We also used cooperative learning and group projects.

Through that, the students had to use problem-solving skills. They selected a subject and they had to narrow down that topic. They then had to target their audience. They used statistics from surveys that were completed in our county to narrow down the topics. From that they had to come up with strategies that met the needs of the age students that they were working with. They used communications skills, time management, problem solving by setting times and project schedules. This is also an excellent example of service learning, which is becoming a fast-paced strategy in Kentucky.

We also incorporated speakers over the 18 weeks of this course. We had about 14 different speakers. They not only talked about their topics, but they also talked about their careers, so students were exposed to information, plus they got information about various careers. We went on field trips — we had about eight different field trips. So they not only learned about our community but also surrounding communities in our area. And, as Leslie mentioned earlier, they had service to the community requirements and they were required to do 10 hours. We had a total of 235 hours from just the students — not talking about the service hours that Leslie and I put in. I only had two students out of 24 that did not complete 10 hours, so I thought that was really good. And with the 90-minute blocks, of course, we had to work in some games and activities, and I used activities that teach, that go along with the different topics that I was teaching for the day.

We also learned the planning process, the five-step planning process, because I felt that was important. They learned about goal-setting also.

You can see, these are some of our field trips that we went on, and everybody had their favorite. We've got some pictures that we're going to show you in just a minute and we'll talk a little bit about those. There are our numerous speakers that we had — and if we talk about a favorite, mine was probably the addiction counselor. She came in and worked with the students on how addiction affects families and the roles that the different family members take on, and it was just so true to life, really true to life. This is in our county, so you get a look at the Green River, and we are getting on the bus and visiting in our county. Sewer plant — we went to the water treatment and the sewer plant, and of the 24 students that I had in class, none of them had been to the sewer plant, and it's about two miles away from our school, so this was a new opportunity for us. We went to Western Kentucky University for an all-day trip. The students participated in a leadership conference and I think this is one they enjoyed also. These are my students.

This is TEAMCO — this is a ropes course. We spent a day at TEAMCO, building skills and leadership also and becoming a group — because when we went out to do this project we had to learn how to work together and to cooperate. This is what we were hoping we would gain from TEAMCO. We also had challenges from TEAMCO, and you can see that my student is being harnessed up — again, she had a team of other students that were going to lift her up about 30 feet in the air. You can see one of my male students walking across the log. And this is kind of how the students looked when they came down off the log and gathered their breath. This is just one of our speakers at the water plant. He was discussing the different chemicals and how they test and treat the water. This is our local health nurse, and she came in. She not only talked about careers, but she showed them how to suture and just talked a little bit about birth control, and gave us some insight into medical health.

Next, we have Cassidy Williamson. Cassidy is a senior at McLean County High School, and she will be talking about partnerships and developing partnerships through this program.

CASSIDY WILLIAMSON: To make our project go successfully, we had to have lots of different partners- so I'm going to tell you some of those. We had law enforcement from our country, which is McLean County, and then Davies County is a neighboring county; our high school's Family and Consumer Sciences Department; our high school's Youth Services Center; the Green River District Health Department; Family, Career and Community Leaders of America — and for our school, I'm the chapter president and Ms. Martin's the adviser, and a lot of our projects are extensions of the organization: 4-H; West Area Health Education Center; the Kentucky Cancer Program; Western Kentucky University; River Valley Behavioral Heath; Department of Public Health in the area of tobacco control; and Owensboro Mercy Health Systems.

We gained support from our school and community in lots of different ways. The first one was the local newspaper. It's published weekly, and they were really good about publishing different writings the students had written about the field trips or guest speakers we had. Our teachers were very supportive in that when we missed classes for field trips they would work with us to catch up on the work that we'd missed or lectures, taking notes or anything. We have a new principal this year, and he really supports community involvement, so he supported our class and the community service hours, and he always put our needs first. We gained support from the community. They would come in our class as guest speakers, and we would also see them in their place of business on the field trips. So they supported us that way. And we live in a really close-knit community, so that made it easy to build relationships with the people there and to make contacts for our projects.

The first year we did this project, we would have to tell people in the community that we were available for community service. This year, because they knew we were so reliable and we would be there, they actually called us for the help. These are just some pictures of our partners. This is the 4-H agent, and she talked about recycling and environmental issues. This is the career counselor from West Area Health Center — she just told us about different careers in the medical field. This is a deputy of the sheriff's department, I think, and he was telling us about the dangers of drugs. And this is an environmentalist. Here she's digging up some soil to show us the different layers and things. But she also talked about restaurant sanitation and how she would go in and inspect the places.

Now Crystal Cox, who's also a senior, is going to tell you about the challenges we faced with our project.

CRYSTAL COX: We faced many challenges in this project. One of these was funding. As you can see, budgeting grant funds. Our superintendent this year wanted us to use a part of our grant to have a school nurse, but that's not what our grant was specified for, so that wasn't possible. We needed time to cover materials — we only had one semester, and we had so many things that to do and so many field trips that we wanted to go on that we just couldn't get everything in that we wanted to. We needed time to prepare projects — we only had to weeks at the end of the semester to do our projects, and we had a difficult time, we felt really pressured. But we overcame that, and we were able to have successful projects. School functions kept interrupting our fourth period class, but something you might want to think about is the time period you have this class. We had homerooms and pep rallies that just kept interrupting us, and this class was very important to us and we didn't like all those interruptions. We had requirements of open responses, and at one time they asked us to spend 20 minutes of our class doing open response, and that was not really what a part of our classroom was about.

We had many personality conflicts sometimes. Whenever we got down and dirty in our projects, some people might get irritated at other people in their group, so we had to overcome those. Future funding — that was a problem. We're not really sure where we going to get the money for this project later, because it takes a lot of money to do field trips and we're just not real sure where that's going to come from. Planning and scheduling — Our two teachers had to work together and plan ahead just so we could get everything done, and that's sometimes a problem. This is how we overcame our challenges when we went on our field trips. We had to trust people on the ground to hold us up and make sure we didn't fall on our harnesses. Then this is Ms. Martin. She had to overcome a challenge herself and learn that she could swing from 30 feet up in the air.

Andy Vandiver will be speaking to you next. He's a senior and he's going to talk to you about the results and outcomes of our project.

ANDY VANDIVER: Some of the results of our project are: 235 hours of community service served. We also were able to teach 496 students, and five community projects came out of this. Also, some of the students in our class made career choices to become teachers or follow other health careers. Some of the ways we served our community were: at Santa's Workshop, Safe School Week, Island Wood Bridge Festival, the PTO [Parent Teacher Organization] babysitting service, Christmas for Kids Projects, Worlds Greatest Baby Shower, Red Ribbon Week, Inmate Outreach Program, and various extracurricular activities.

This is Island Wood Bridge Festival. The World's Greatest Baby Shower. This was part of Safe School Week. The Inmate Outreach Program — an individual came and talked to us about the effects of drugs and violence in his life and how it led to prison. This is also a part of Safe School Week — we planted a tree in remembrance of the victims of violence in school. Another part of Safe School Week was signing pledge cards — parents and students signed pledge cards and then later on they were put on a wall in our school, as you can see. This is Christmas for Kids. And Santa's Workshop.

Some of the opportunities this project brought to our school were: equipment purchased to expand technology was two laptops, an in-focus machine, a video camera, a digital camera, a new computer, and also educational videos; scholarship opportunities that came out of this were from the experience in the program that helped to get scholarships; community service; communications skills in both speech and writing; and the student experience and engagement in the community through field trips and service — we go to more about our community.

And now Katie will speak changes in our school and community that the project has encouraged.

KATIE EVERLY: With a class like ours, we had many changes that came out of it. One of them was that we realized the opportunity and careers that were available to us. One of the field trips that we mentioned earlier was to tour a health park. Here we got to go in and see the environment we would be in if we were interested in a health field. Also, one of our speakers was a career counselor. She came in and told us about all the different kinds of possibilities that are available to us in a number of different career fields and what was involved if we wanted to pursue them. We also brought community leaders into our school, and we had an addiction counselor, a family planning coordinator, an epidemiologist, and local law enforcement officers, and they told us what was necessary to stay on the right track and just gave us really good advice that we can use in life. Through our projects, we brought unity within our school and the community. We were also more connected to the community through community service and service learning. And that marks the end of our presentation.

THERESA LEWALLEN: Thank you all. I'm so appreciative of the teachers who brought the students and of the students who have to make up all of the work that they've missed. They've been here for several days because the Health and Education Consortium members — those are the 10 grantees, the co-directors from each of those sites — have been here in San Antonio for two days prior to the ASCD conference, having their meeting, and the students that have participated in that meeting have really been helpful in helping the advisory committee and the staff understand from their perspective some of the challenges they faced. It's been great to have them and we certainly appreciate their time and effort.

I just wanted to say a few more words about the initiative and give you a few resources that are available, and then if you have questions, you'll ask the question and I'll repeat it. If you want to direct that, fine; otherwise, we'll have everybody respond. The Health in Education Initiative has a website that is part of the ASCD website and the address http://www.ascd.org/health_in_education. That website contains some materials that educators can use to learn more about public health issues and careers and a variety of resources, and also information about the 10 projects. Just from the sample you heard this morning, you can imagine each of them is unique. What has been great about this project and a lot of fun is that they've each come up with unique solutions to their problems and ways of engaging their students in addressing those problems. What makes that particularly helpful is, we think it makes it possible to replicate the project in a variety of settings. You can select a project that matches your geographic area or the type of work you want to do with students. So we're really pleased about the efforts that have been put forth by the schools, the public health agencies, the universities — all of the partners in those projects over the past two years.

ASCD will continue to look at the outcomes and the information that we're received from those projects and move forward with developing some more resources — possibly some professional development sessions or other resources for educators — so that as they look at pieces of the project or the project as a whole, they can take those into their communities and work with their public health organizations and other community organizations to engage students more actively in addressing community problems. And also helping the students learn their core subjects in a way that may be more relevant to some of them. So I did want to close by saying that the schools are finished their work this school year, but ASCD has not finished its work on the Health and Education Initiative, and we look forward to continuing to explore ways to help people do their efforts in integrating health into the curriculum, public health issues, or just looking at the intersection of health and education in the schools and communities. So with that closing remark, if there are any questions, we'd be glad to take them. There are handouts available at the front of the room if you didn't get them, and I'll try to find a way to have some of the handouts available on the Health in Education website.

[question from audience]

The question was, since the schools have been working for two years, what are the plans for them moving forward? I'm going to ask someone from each of the projects to address their ideas about that.

JULIE GAST: We received support to continue the project in terms of the administrators wanting to keep doing this, but it is a funding issue. The project was expensive. We had to go out and beg, borrow, and steal other money along with AFCD money. So our desire is to do this project in Utah and also to replicate it in other sites, and we are submitting grant proposals at various places to hopefully do that.

KATHERINE KINSEY: We've had many funding opportunities that also end. But we've had the unique opportunity to use our students and clinical faculty and public health nurses to extend that at least through our nursing students for a period of time. And we've also been able to parlay what we've done in the past into other future grant work. It is not our expectation that the School District of Philadelphia would at all fund this if they're already bankrupt. So we have to be candid about what the challenges are within the school district. What would be ideal for us is to get some positive PR out of it in a way that's a good spin, so that someone might take note of what has happened, not only in Philadelphia but across the nation, and be able to realize that sometimes it takes an external agency to be able to make good things happen for school districts. So there is much more of a collaborative emphasis on whatever we would do in the future.

JUDY MARTIN: At McLean County High School, we are funded for this year. We think we can make it through this year. And then after that the lieutenant governor is working on a program called Keep the Beat, and that's going to be funded by CDC. Hopefully, we can work along with that and keep our program going. Our field trips are really our problem. In a rural community where we've got 92 cents a mile for a field trip, we have to come up with that money. We also have to pay a bus driver, so if you going 50, 60, 100 miles transporting students, it gets fairly expensive. So the field trips are what we're going to have to work on, and think that's really an important part of our class, getting our students out into the community. But I think we can keep things going.

THERESA LEWALLEN: One of the pieces of conversation that the project directors have had with myself and other staff over the past couple of days was how to keep our efforts going together and how to continue to work together to spread the word and to see how we can support each other in continuing the work. So we'll continue to work together as a group and look at not only funding issues but also other time and resource issues and ways to help school administrators and community leaders understand the importance of some of these projects — and look at ways they can be supportive from outside.

I want to thank our speakers, thank everyone who was here to present at 8:00 o'clock this morning, and I really appreciate the fact that the high school students were here also to present at this time. Thank you all for being with us this morning, and thank you for coming to listen. I appreciate your time and your attentativeness, and if you have any questions afterward, you can contact me through email at health@ascd.org, or call the ASCD main number and just for me. Thank you.

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