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.

III. Rebecca Partlow, Rock Hill School District 3, South Carolina

REBECCA PARTLOW: Good afternoon. Let me just say before I get too much further in this, I am not the school health coordinator. I am, as you could see from the introduction, the director of personnel, and the school health coordinator should be the person here talking to you, because she is the one who has single-handedly made an impact in our district that's almost immeasurable. In fact, she was recognized in Washington about a month ago by ACS, American Cancer Society, for her leadership and what she has done in our district.

Let me tell you for just a minute about our district. We are about 15 miles below Charlotte, North Carolina, so you would call us a suburb, I imagine. We have 22 school sites, and we have about 15,300 students with approximately 1,100 teachers and administrators. So that gives you an idea of what size our district is. And we have one school health coordinator. This one person was a part of our state's mandated comprehensive school health legislation that occurred back in the eighties.

Initially, Susan York, who is the school health coordinator, started by being the teacher of 5th and 6th graders, their health component. Actually, we called her the sex ed teacher — or the sexy teacher, whichever — because she was primarily responsible for teaching that particular component and teaching it correctly, as defined by the state legislation. Obviously, that could be a dead-end kind of thing, but it has evolved into her role and something that is very noteworthy. And what we have, as you can see, is our mission statement for the district. It does relate to students and what we want to have as the end result with them — that they do have skills, knowledge, and the desire to be a lifelong learner in a changing world. It's certainly very important.

Our strategic plan actually has five components. Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment is one of those components. In each one of the five components you can see a very strong link to what health is in that particular areas, and here we talk about preparing students to survive and thrive in a global society. And we're not talking about just preparing them mentally. We're talking about preparing them socially, emotionally, and physical, as well. And so you have all of those aspects in curriculum. You also see that you have mention of Environment, Child Growth and Development — these are also components of what you would find addressed in a school health program. I'm going to just hit the hot spots.

The next slide relates to Climate, which is certainly where school health is going to be a major emphasis. You can see it provides safe, orderly, drug-free schools. That is one of the ways that Susan's job is funded, through our Safe and Drug-Free Schools grant, and I think we get about $65,000 a year from that, so that does help us with funding her position but certainly not all the funding. You can see the other areas where we're talking about health how obviously health is going to impact a positive environment, which is relating to our climate.

Another one of our components of the strategic plan is Collaboration. And, again, collaboration is something that is addressed through our school health program and has to be. You heard Glenda just a few minutes ago talking about all of these entities, all of these people who need to be a part of your program and how to get buy-in from all the various ones. This is where the collaboration piece comes in, and it's not just our schools, it's our community, it's our state — and, obviously, through what Susan has been doing with American Cancer Society, it's national as well. So that's where the collaboration piece comes in.

Staff is one of our five strategic planning goals, and it's the one that I am mostly responsible for. I work with not only recruiting teachers to my district but with the ones who are in my district. Some of the things that I know that I do that particularly relate to the health aspect are those where I am providing employee assistance programs for the teachers. All of the first-year teachers have mentors, and that is a key to the success of first-year teachers. These mentors are given training in how you work with a first-year teacher that goes beyond just the academic support — it's into the emotional and the social and physical as well. In fact, I had a first-year teacher the other day tell me that I need to start a dating service. I'm not sure that I'm ready to go that far, but that might even be a health issue. But definitely staff is of major importance to me.

Finance — we can't do all these things unless we are dealing with the financial end of it. And, as I said, we started health and having a comprehensive approach or a coordinated approach much earlier than maybe some states have, but we really didn't look at it from a coordinated standpoint probably until about maybe five to six years ago. And we have, in those last five or six years, really found ways to fund our coordinated school health program. This year we received a total of about $600,000 through various grants to fund coordinated school health. One of those was the Middle School Coordinators Grant. We just hired four middle school coordinators, for each one of our four middle schools. And they are not necessarily from teaching backgrounds. One is a teacher. He's a science teacher. We have one registered dietician and we have one who has a master's in health and one who is a social worker. So four very different backgrounds, all working in our middle schools and funded through a Middle School Coordinators Grant. And then I think I've already mentioned the Safe and Drug-Free Schools, and we have an ACS grant as well. So we do have funding for our program, but definitely you've got to finance it. It is something that requires money.

The next slide you'll see is a matrix that helps you in comparing what your process and procedures are against what your strategic plan is. That's the whole focus of what we're doing today — talking about how your strategic plan and coordinated school health are together. So simply using this matrix will help you see where you do meet that goal and where you don't and maybe can change some things.

The next slide is really a piece of Susan York's job description is in the district. You can see the various things that she does. I wish that we could go into great detail — and again I wish she could have been here to talk about it, because she could tell you all these things. But coordinating the wellness program for the district may involve things like health screening. It may involve things like putting a group of teachers together on the Ropes course — in fact, she actually handles our district Ropes course that we use quite frequently with students as well as with staff.

I think the next slide is also one that shows you a few other things that she does as the school health coordinator for the district. Some of the critical elements in our district coordinated school health program … As you can see, we have a team that is representative of the eight components of coordinated school health: a framework for systematic planning, implementation and documentation, and I'm not sure if you've heard of the Mariner model, but the Mariner model is one of the models that we use that provides that framework. Our superintendent has been a great support for coordinated school. And, again, when Susan received this award in Washington just recently, our superintendent was with her because he was invited to come as a supporter of health and as someone who definitely is worthy of recognition as well.

Staff wellness program — again, I mention to you that we have several components of staff wellness, and we do have the middle school health coordinators now who work individually with the middle school staff. We have an employee assistance program, we have various and sundry other things that make up that staff wellness program. And we have the community linkages and resource utilization. As I said, I would like to go into a good many more of these kinds of things, but I'm afraid I'm going to take too much of Eva's time and she has some really important stuff to share with you. I'd be glad to provide any other information for you. If you need to get any more information about our program, you may contact me or Susan York, who is the school health coordinator for our district. Eva?

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