As childhood obesity rates continue to rise, and as First Lady Michelle Obama promotes her “Let’s Move” campaign to encourage children and families to live active, healthy lifestyles, student health is at the forefront of parents’ and teachers’ concerns.
Many companies, in turn, now focus on helping educators incorporate healthy living and healthy choices into classroom lessons and administrative decisions.
“There are a lot of organizations with the objective of trying to make healthier students,” said Leslie Lytle, a board member at the Dannon Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to nutrition. “A lot of them work through teachers, giving them information to use in their classrooms and pass on to their students. We wanted to take a different tack, because we thought there was another area that was being underserved.”
That area proved to be the larger school environment. Dannon Institute researchers realized that teachers and students might not always have control over the choices that can improve their daily health regimen.
“It’s not the teacher who controls the food in the vending machine, it’s whoever is charge of the vending contract. It’s not the teacher who controls if there’s adequate physical education time built into the school schedule, it’s the principal or some other committee,” said Lytle. “We really believe this environmental piece is incredibly important, and the big hole that we saw in that environmental piece is that the ultimate decision maker at the school district is the superintendent.”
As a result, the Dannon Institute has tried to make health issues a priority with superintendents, writing brief tip sheets and minute papers that address their importance.
“We try to work with school superintendents to help them first realize or embrace the idea that school wellness is a critical issue that impacts not only the health of students, but how they do in school,” said Lytle. “We know that students who come to school hungry or don’t eat well will miss more school, have greater absenteeism, and can’t concentrate. We try to focus on the fact that it’s not just about [school] wellness just for the sake of wellness, but also meets their academic goals as well.”
The Dannon Institute first works on helping superintendents recognize that healthy options are important, then gives them the tools to facilitate a healthier campus while providing them with examples of superintendents across the country who have already made these changes.
Lytle said that the organization focuses on smaller changes to ease schools into a wellness routine.
“Take a look at your schools and identify two or three places where you think you can improve in your school environment. And once [you] make those easier changes, a lot of other things fall in place,” she recommended.
She added that healthier options aren’t just beneficial for students.
“With two-thirds of adults in our country being overweight or obese, two-thirds of school staff are overweight or obese, so to think about the school environment as not only an environment for students but a work environment, and to offer ways to make that work environment healthier by having healthier foods in vending—and offering places for students and staff to walk on campus—might help on the health insurance costs,” Lytle said.
Other companies are backing digital solutions to unhealthy campuses. Learntobehealthy.org was created by a physical health education center based in York, Pa., that expanded from live teaching theaters to online outreach.
“Teachers wanted more after they came here for [teaching theater] programs, and that’s how learntobehealthy.org was created, because they wanted to extend the learning into the classroom,” said Humera Proctor, the eLearning project manager for learntobehealthy.org.
“We try to take whatever we can from the theater program to bring that same wow factor to the site,” said Proctor, adding that the learning activities are created by in-house instructional designers.
Currently the site offers more than 130 different lesson plans and activities for topics ranging from dental health to tobacco and inhalants. It also offers a mental health section that includes a bullying prevention unit.
“All of our lessons are standards-based for national and state standards, so if a teacher in California would like to utilize one of our activities, [she] can very easily map to what standards that activity fulfills in [her] state,” Proctor said.
The site has been grant-funded in the past, allowing its operators to offer it to educators free of charge—but the grant is coming to an end. To combat the depletion in funds, learntobehealthy.org now offers different levels of membership, with a $29.95 fee offering access to everything on the site.
“We want to provide everyone with help to make healthy lifestyle choices, because that’s what it all comes down to is choices,” said Proctor.
NetNutrition has taken the quest for healthy choices to mobile devices. The program corresponds with whatever software schools already possess and makes it easy for students, faculty, and guests to access nutritional information.
“We had a lot of customers who had nutrition analysis within their systems and they had what was on the menu, but they wanted to make that more available to consumers,” said Heather Whitehouse, product manager with the CBORD Group, which created NetNutrition. “NetNutrition just snaps on to the system they already have that already has all of their recipes analyzed.”
In addition to showing users what’s on the menu, it also provides nutrition analysis and filtering capabilities.
“If students have gluten intolerance and they don’t want to see anything that contains gluten, they can indicate that, and then the menu is narrowed down only to display things that are appropriate. They can do the same thing with preferences, so if I’m a vegetarian and only want to see things that don’t have meat in them, I can do that and really focus on the menu choices I want,” Whitehouse said.
NetNutrition also offers other filters, such as dining location, kosher, or locally-grown items only.
The program is completely customizable as well, so that schools and colleges can make it match the appearance of their existing website.
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