New Action for Healthy Kids Report Shows How to Engage School Leaders in Creating a Healthier School Environment

A new Action for Healthy Kids (AFHK) report shows that without buy-in from superintendents, administrators, and principals, any school wellness initiative is destined to be less successful and lasting, than it might otherwise be.  The report also reveals that it takes persistence and ingenuity in order to access, excite and engage school leaders in issues pertaining to the health of students. 

The AFHK report “From the Top Down:  Engaging School Leaders in Creating a Healthier, More Physically Active School Environment,” describes ways in which AFHK teams are clarifying goals and recruiting school leaders to be active players in creating healthier school environments.  Those tactics are relayed through success stories drawn from three different states: Rhode Island, West Virginia, and Indiana, and reveal the need to streamline and suggest appropriate and easily implementable from-the-top solutions.  Other ways that are shown to be effective in engaging school leaders are also revealed including: making school leadership intrinsic to the initiative at hand; helping administrators recognize the bottom-line academic value of such initiatives; and acknowledging, rewarding, and celebrating the inevitable successes in a way that is visible to the community at large.  The report also discusses the challenges involved in reaching school leaders such as their lack of time as well as more urgent and/or shifting priorities.    

For example, the Rhode Island’s Team tool for reaching school leaders was the creation and rollout of what came to be known as the “Lunch & Learn” program – a series of on-site, high-level lunches hosted in each school district. These lunch sessions were structured as a way for district leaders – in a course of an hour, and over a healthful catered lunch served conveniently in their offices – to get educated about the vital and growing importance of healthy eating and physical activity in the school environment. 

According to the report, the Rhode Island initiative was a result of years of trying in vain, in more mundane ways, to reach administrators about the school wellness issue.  Lunch & Learn was found to be the solution – a way to focus the attention of district leaders in a concentrated, one-hour, mid-day session.  One of the approaches used was to involve food service in creating the lunch, which was a way to bring them into the approach. Moreover, the Rhode Island Team understood the needs of principals and superintendents and established that the main message to be used in the “Lunch & Learn” sessions would be “the academic sell” by drawing a straight cause-and-effect line from nutrition and increased physical activity to higher academic achievement.

Through “Lunch & Learn”, the Rhode Island team was able to encourage nearly 70% of districts they met with to form wellness committees as standard subcommittees of local school boards.  In addition, the establishment of such subcommittees was subsequently mandated by law in the State of Rhode Island. 

To learn more about strategies utilized to involve school leaders with school wellness issues within Rhode Island as well as West Virginia and Indiana, please visit:  http://www.actionforhealthykids.org/pdf/SchoolLeaders_FR_1219Final.pdf.

For additional information, please contact:

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Source: From the Top Down: Engaging School Leaders in Creating a Healthier, More Physically Active School Environment, Action for Healthy Kids Field Report, Vol. 1, No. 3, Action for Healthy Kids.