9.17.14 Take the Healthy Me, Better Year Pledge!

Winning Your Way to Wellness

NEAHIN is all about wellness, so we couldn’t think of a better raffle prize to offer at the 2014 NEA Expo than the Pulse O2 Personal Fitness Tracker! Tracking calories, activity, heart and pulse rate and even your sleep, this little beauty is like having a tiny personal wellness assistant on your shoulder, helping you look out for you. 

You know YOU, the person that so often gets overlooked in life.

We had almost 500 people enter the raffle in Denver and are excited to announce the winners!

Congratulations to the NEAHIN Raffle Winners:

• Kayla Kolbe, Minnesota

• Nadine Hale, New Jersey

• Thomas Holstein, Rhode Island

• Sue Mattry, Pennsylvania

Your prizes are in the mail and you are just days away from a new road to personal wellness. Thanks to all of the entrants – we truly appreciate your support.

On a personal note, I was so impressed by this little gadget I have decided to treat myself to one. I am a person who could really use a “tiny personal wellness assistant” to get me going and keep me motivated. Do you use some sort of fitness tracker? We would love to hear about it! Send in your fitness tracker tips, stories and pictures to [email protected].

Three cheers for wellness,

Bethe

Today’s Health Educator {Part 1)

What do you remember about learning health when you were in school? Can you remember how you learned about the health risks involved with drug and alcohol abuse? Can you remember learning about the Food Pyramid? What about how to manage your stress? The truth of the matter is when asking these questions of educators today the responses of the “what” are just as vast as the responses of the “how”.” Some of you will describe experiences that occurred during a formal school experience, such as during an actual health class – we will call that “formal” health education. Some will describe experiences and memories with friends or a health-related conversation with a parent or older sibling or in other classes  – we will call that “informal” health education. And, whom are we kidding? Some won’t remember what they had for breakfast earlier in the day day!

Luckily, whether you remember every detail or just a glance, throughout our lives we have all learned messages and information about our health. Curriculum is the “what” that encompasses the knowledge, skills, and experiences of learners. It is both the planned (“formal”) and unplanned (“informal”) experiences students have in schools, both of which result in learning. When looking at the planned experiences, we can examine voluntary National Health Education Standards as well as what each state and/or school district has in place to set forth what health topics and learning objectives will be met.

State and local education agency laws or policies and procedures for implementing health education will vary greatly and dictate things such as the “who” (identify the educator/role at any given school chiefly responsible for providing ‘formal” health instruction) and the “how” (the courses and methods to be used). For example, according to the CDC’s 2012 School Health Profiles system, about 50% of schools (in the 43 participating states) reported that they require students to take two or more health education classes. Conducted every two years, the School Health Profiles is a system of surveys assessing school health policies and practices in states, large urban school districts, territories, and tribal governments. In some instances, where specific/separate health courses are not required, Health education is integrated or shares time with other content areas and the amount of time students will spend learning about health (“formally”) may be set forth through laws or policies as well. Though, health education is rarely formally assessed.

Even when a student is fortunate enough to have a formal health education experience from a certified health education specialist, is that the only health education he or she will receive? Think back on your own experiences. Think about it like this: within the school setting itself, either in other classes (outside of a formal health education setting), before and after school (on buses or in sports activities), and certainly at lunch time – our students encounter MANY unplanned experiences related to their health. That’s the thing about health, its everywhere. How do you choose to eat in the cafeteria? Why is it important not to be sedentary for long periods of time?

So, this is where magic meets logic – we, as educators who may or may not be “officially” responsible for formal health education know how important health education is. We also know that whether we plan for it to happen or not, students are naturally learning about their health all day long at school. This logical knowledge results in the following magical aha moment: wouldn’t it be helpful if we were all somewhat familiar with the actual planned health education experiences? So that when topics naturally occur, we can at least be on the right field, in the right arena, on the right train as to what students should be learning about health.

Doesn’t education work better if we all support one another’s efforts to teach our students what is intended for them to learn? This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to know how to explain technical health knowledge to students if you are a mathematics educator. What this means is, as a mathematics educator, you will be better at teaching your subject, if you can connect math skills that involve interpreting data, to real life problems such as teen prescription drug abuse. You will enable your students to make connections between the skills they learn in school and their real world applications. Educators are going to do this anyway; supporting health education with intent when making these practical connections is what we, at HIN, hope to be able to help you to do.  

You are about to embark on a journey, we will be taking a look at health education, where has it been and where could it be going; we will share experiences of educators like yourselves from all types of school settings (from classroom teachers to school nurse; representing health education in both formal and informal contexts).

Your charge is this: learn how every educator can support health education and advocate for the quality of implementation that our students deserve.

There are resources to help support your efforts and we want to share those too, we will call those “souvenirs” from our tour. You can start today by exploring two of HIN’s most recent heath curriculum resources which can be utilized in both classroom based and non-traditional education settings (i.e., by before or afterschool program leaders, food service professionals who work with students during lunchtime, etc.). Check out Healthy Steps for Healthy Lives (Nutrition and Physical Activity lessons) and Rx for Understanding: Preventing Prescription Drug Abuse (lessons to address teen prescription drug abuse).

Health education has many faces and you will see one of those faces by simply looking in the mirror. Everyone is a “Health Teacher” in some way, so please join us for our Tour of Health Education blog series. Our next stop – the Recipe for Effective Health Education – we hope two see you there!

Food Fight! Improving the Quality and Profitability of School Food Service Programs

This month, Education Support Professionals (ESPs) got together in San Francisco, CA for our national NEA Education Support Professionals conference. This included three days of workshops to help us network, advocate and find our voice for a wide variety of issues facing our professions. 

The title of my workshop, “Food Fight!” was a play on words. No actual fight with food took place. However, it had a dual meaning for school food service workers. There seems to be a food fight everywhere we turn. Someone, some organization, some government entity is shouting to anyone that will listen, their philosophy of how to better serve school children with their understanding of nutrition issues. There is a constant fight to ensure their way is administered.  

Food service workers (“Lunch Ladies” as we are known to our students) have a different understanding of how nutrition issues play out each day across the nation in our schools. From obesity to food scarcity, we see them all. 

Our workshop (Food Fight) focused on improving the quality and profitability of school food service programs to promote student health and build support for school foods. We discussed the necessity of healthy, wholesome foods and the positive impacts it has for students. There are, of course, challenges for school food service programs to implement the new nutrition guidelines successfully. But we also learned that, the majority of schools are getting it right. From portion sizes to whole grains, we are seeking to implement healthier standards in our schools.

However, when schools are in direct competition with other food sources, we ourselves are in danger. The danger comes in the form of threats of outsourcing, finger pointing and loss of moral. We must advocate for our professions so that administration and school boards will not mistakenly believe that outsourcing will relieve their administrative and financial headaches. Involving all ESP’s, teachers, parents, and community members to help raise awareness about nutritious school meals that will help students succeed in the classroom and ultimately in life.

In our discussion from child nutrition professionals around the nation, we realized that we play a part in the fate of our children, their health and wellness, through school meals. We must continue to encourage students, and in some cases ourselves, to make healthy food choices. Our goal is to use our knowledge to help each student reach their full potential, thereby becoming tomorrow’s productive citizen. In America, we all (should) get a chance, what we do with that chance is our decision. Worrying about healthy, wholesome food should not be on our plate as citizens of the greatest nation on earth. We need to become a nation that exemplifies healthy eating habits. Eating to live, and not living to eat.  

For more information on how to improve the quality and profitability of your school food service program visit:

• NEA HIN’s Bag the Junk: www.neahin.org/bagthejunk
• National Farm to School Network: www.farmtoschool.org/
• Let’s Move!: www.letsmove.gov