Steps to Keep Students Safe and Healthy

Presenters: Eva Marx, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Hingham, MA; Glenda Wait, Belleville Henderson Central School District, Belleville, NY; Rebecca Partlow, Rock Hill School District 3, Charlotte, SC

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

SUSAN SMITH: I'm Susan Smith. I've been asked to facilitate this session the afternoon, and I hope that you've had a good conference thus far. I'm pleased to introduce to you Eva Marx, the school health consultant working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help make people aware of the Healthy Youth Funding Database website. Eva has brought with her several co-presenters and I'm going to allow her the opportunity to introduce those people to you. I'm sure we're in for an enjoyable hour and a half. Thank you.

I. Eva Marx, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

EVA MARX: Welcome. I'm happy to be here. My co-presenters, whose names did not get on the program, unfortunately, are Glenda Wait, and she is the Superintendent of the Belleville Henderson Central School District [Belleville, NY], and Rebecca Partlow, who is Director of Personnel for the Rock Hill School District 3 in South Carolina, and I'm delighted that they've decided to join us. Could we just quickly hear where everyone here is from and what you do?

Now Glenda and Rebecca are going to talk about how their communities are implementing Coordinated School Health Programs, then I'm going to conclude with some strategies for identifying funding for those programs.

As we all know — we can't be in schools without knowing — that schools are under some really strong pressures now. There are requirements for testing, report cards for schools on the progress that they're making, and there are strict consequences for schools that don't make the grade. There are penalties for schools that fail and strong measures such as state takeover, replacement of the principal or staff, or becoming a charter school. Also, there is work to upgrade the quality of teacher standards.

So what's happening to the people in the schools? They're stressed. Teachers worry about their careers, principals worry about their careers, students worry about test results, and stress results in low morale and poor overall health for the entire population. So both students and staff have serious health problems that threaten their well being and interfere with their ability to learn. Some of these are improving — as you heard Joycelyn Elders this morning say, teen pregnancies are going down. There are some things that are looking better. But there are many things that continue to be of concern, and other issues are becoming worse.

Again, you've heard much of this stated this morning, but I want to repeat this. One child in four is at risk of failure in school because of social, emotional, and physical health problems. Five million children suffer from asthma. This is a relatively new problem, but it seems to be very much on the increase. More than 3,000 students are smoking every day. Twenty-two percent of ninth-graders report carrying a weapon in the previous month of the survey that was done, and our concerns about school safety continues. On any given night, more than 100,000 children are homeless and nearly one million teenagers become pregnant every year. These are just a few of the issues that are interfering with students' learning.

Schools are addressing these issues. They have a variety of programs. Each of you represent one or more of those programs. But they are offered in a way that is not as efficient or effective as they might be. People do not communicate with each other in the way that they might. There are duplications. So what we're proposing is another model, which is the Coordinated School Health Program. It's a model that's being promoted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and there are eight components. I think each of you will find that what you're doing will fall within one of those eight components.

There is health education, which again you heard a great deal about this morning. There is physical education, which helps students to promote lifelong activity, as well as to combat conditions of obesity that we hear about now. Health services, which helps to identify students' health issues and also make referrals and see that their needs are taken care of. Nutrition services — healthy foods in the cafeteria, healthy snacks, vending machines that have healthy food in them rather than junk food, all those issues. Counseling, psychological, and social services — a very important area. Social and emotional health seems to be a problem that is interfering — with many, many students worrying — and again stress is something that's contributing to that.

A healthy school environment, which includes not only physical safety and being sure that equipment is safe, but ensuring that there aren't toxic substances in the environment. Also, the social and emotional environment and policies that support a healthy school environment. Policies that prohibit smoking on campus, policies that address things like sexual harassment — all kinds of policies that again can help to support the entire school environment. Health promotion for staff — Becky can certainly speak to that. If the staff isn't healthy, the school isn't going to be healthy, and if your staff isn't concerned about its health, it can't provide good role models for your students either. One of the schools that I've worked with actually was concerned about addressing school health in general because the principal noticed, that when the teachers signed in each morning, there were always quite a number of absences among teachers as well as among students. So he decided that this was really something that he couldn't afford to support and began to investigate ways to improve the health of the school, so that his staff would be there as well. And then family-community involvement . As we all know, without family support, none of this will work. Students need their families to support their health. And the schools cannot do this work alone. They need to have agencies to work with them and to support them. So those are the eight components.

So schools and districts that have successful Coordinated School Health Programs have policies that support a safe, healthy environment, a school community health council that pulls together the school and the community, a school health team that represents the eight components that I just described so that they can coordinate their work, and a school health coordinator, a person on staff whose job it is to see that these things are carried out. And now I'm going to turn it over to Glenda who's going to talk about what's going on in her district.

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