Janet Brown is the program officer for food systems at the Center for Ecoliteracy.
An extraordinary opportunity is unfolding across the country, and all
of us can contribute to its success. In response to a federal mandate,
public school districts are forming Wellness Committees—working
groups entrusted with the responsibility for developing Wellness Policies
for their districts. When these Wellness Policies take effect by fall
of 2006, they will collectively begin to influence the health and learning
outcomes of all public school children in America.
Wellness Committee volunteers can play a leadership role in drafting
policies that ensure high standards for health and learning are adopted
by the district. The Wellness Policy development process can serve the
purpose of a town meeting on wellness, with the community’s children
at the heart of the discussion. The federal government has stipulated
five areas affecting student well-being that Wellness Policies must address:
nutrition education and activity, guidelines for foods served at school,
assurance of minimum standards, a way to measure success, and a plan
to ensure that the community is fully represented in the process.
Used to its fullest potential, the Wellness Policy development process
removes, or severely limits, the influence of commercial and outside
interests over children at school, and restores authority for decisions
affecting the health of children to their parents and communities. It
provides an opportunity for the entire district to define, and align
on, a shared vision of wellness. Wellness Committees are best prepared
to fulfill this responsibility when their membership reflects the cultural,
ethnic, and economic diversity of the communities they serve. They do
their best work when they encourage a full dialogue between those who
work inside the formal school district—school boards, superintendents,
principals, educators, food service professionals, school nurses—and
those who are external to it, but are fully invested in it, including
parents, grandparents, students, and community members.
In light of this exciting and extraordinary challenge, beginning this month and throughout the year ahead, the Center for Ecoliteracy, in collaboration with Slow Food USA and the Chez Panisse Foundation, is distributing a Model Wellness Policy Guide available at www.ecoliteracy.org. The Guide is designed to support the work of Wellness Committee members. It contains language, tools, and instructions for drafting and adopting policies with high standards for learning and health.
The Model Wellness Policy Guide reflects a systems approach to problem
solving that makes practical connections between public education and
public health. This holistic perspective—that health is both a
matter of individual awareness and responsibility and a result of societal
function and support—is fundamental to its design. The process
encourages schools and communities to come to a shared understanding
of wellness—one in which community values and standards can prevail
in decision-making too often compromised by other considerations.
The Guide supports an understanding of wellness that emphasizes connections
among diet, activity, health, environment, and academic achievement.
It recognizes that student wellness is a result of the balanced interplay
of these relationships, and that schools can nurture student wellness
by strengthening this pattern of connections throughout the learning
environment. The policies contained in the Guide promote the integration
of learning experiences linked to diet and health with the core curriculum.
These kinds of connections greatly amplify the potential for student
health and achievement.
Experience has shown that schools will inevitably be challenged in
their educational mission, regardless of how skilled or committed educators
are, if students do not arrive at school healthy, fit, and ready to
learn. A healthy diet and exercise are directly connected to students’ ability
to learn and achieve high standards in school. If public schools hope
to close the “achievement gap” they need to address the
nutrition and activity gap that daily undermines student wellness and
learning outcomes.
Wellness Committees should bear in mind that students are part of the
school community too, and are meant to be part of the process. They
are the best judges of whether or not the program is working. It is
crucial to include students in the development of Wellness Policies,
and to design a student role on the standing Wellness Committee that
oversees implementation. When students conduct and participate in taste
tests and opinion surveys, schools learn the real truth about how school
meal programs measure up. Students are empowered to improve meals served
at school when summaries of student opinion polls and other student
feedback are included in a Wellness Committee’s annual report
to the Board of Education.
Supporting our children’s health and academic achievement is
reason enough to participate on a Wellness Committee, but the Wellness
Policy development process offers so much more. It represents a fresh
start for schools. At a time when diet-related diseases affecting school-age
children are on an alarming rise, and school environments and meal
programs are suspected contributors to the problem, the Wellness Policy
development process supports constructive community engagement and
problem solving with the well-being of children in mind. Introducing
learning experiences connected to diet and health through school gardens
and kitchen classrooms, serving fresh, seasonal, locally grown foods,
and designing eating experiences that promote lifelong wellness, are
practical ways to ensure a healthier future for all communities.
The process offers us a way we can all work together, wherever we live,
to ensure that all children will have access to fresh, delicious, nutritious
meals every school day, served in a pleasant environment, with sufficient
time to eat. It can guarantee opportunities for invigorating physical
exercise to every student every day. It can ensure that activities and
experiences consistent with the goals of wellness are integrated with
the formal learning day, so that students begin to understand how food
reaches the table and the implications that has for their health and
future.
The Model Wellness Policy Guide includes ideas, model language, and
specific recommendations that comprise a foundation for student wellness.
Using language and policy recommendations from the Guide increases
the likelihood that a more holistic and complete understanding of wellness
will result. Adoption of these values-based policies, in school district
after school district, has the potential to generate change beyond
the local level through the persuasive power of our collective alignment
on shared goals and high standards for student wellness.
The best interests of our children are served when this shared vision
of wellness evolves without compromise, integrating community standards
and values with healthy practices modeled at school. If we fail to
establish a policy of high standards for wellness as our starting point,
before addressing where the time, money, personnel, and resources will
come from to realize this vision, then lesser results are inevitable.
The Wellness Policy development process represents one of the most
significant opportunities we have ever had to make dramatic and positive
improvements in the health and well-being of every child.
Janet Brown is the program officer for food systems at the Center for Ecoliteracy. She is the primary author of Rethinking School Lunch, the Center's online guide and planning framework for the reinvention of school meal programs connected to curriculum innovation. In collaboration with the communications team at CEL, she produces Thinking outside the Lunchbox, an ongoing collection of essays that form a conceptual framework for change. She produced the Model Wellness Policy Guide, in collaboration with Slow Food USA and the Chez Panisse Foundation. Janet is a writer, a certified organic farmer in Marin County, and vice-president of Marin Organic, an association of organic farmers that market their produce and products under the Marin Organic label.
This essay is part of Thinking outside the Lunchbox, an ongoing series of essays connected to the Center for Ecoliteracy's Rethinking School Lunch program. Read all the essays at www.ecoliteracy.org
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