Chapter 6

The School Health Program: A Component of Community Health

A coordinated school health program (CSHP) is defined as “an organized set of policies, procedures, and activities designed to protect, promote, and improve the health and well being of students and staff, thus improving the student’s ability to learn.” A CSHP takes a lot of time and effort from many different people, the people who work together to plan and put in place a school health program are referred to as the school health council. For a council to be successful it is important to have a wide variety of members, administrators, food service workers, counseling personnel, maintenance workers, medical personnel, social workers, parents, students, and teachers.

Even though school’s main concern is to educate students, it is hard to educate an unhealthy student. “Health of children and their learning are reciprocally related.” School health policies are written statements that provide a framework to guide all those who work within the program. There are many steps to developing this policy and these steps include, indentifying the policy development team, assessing the districts needs, prioritizing needs and developing an action plan, drafting a policy, building awareness and support, adopting and implementing the policy, maintaining, measuring, and evaluating.

School health education is defined as “planned sequential, K-12 curriculum that addresses the physical, mental, emotional, and social dimensions of health. School health education could play a large role in reducing serious health problems in the United States. The program should focus on the following issues, alcohol and drug free lifestyle, healthy eating, mental and emotional health, personal health and wellness, physical activity, safety/unintentional injury prevention, sexual health, tobacco free lifestyle, and violence prevention.

As stated in the reading school health education could play a big part in reducing some of the serious health problems we have in the United States. However it is alarming how much time or lack of time is spent on health education. It was pretty in our class discussions to only have a semester or two of gym, and a semester of health but we have to spend four years in english classes, three years in math classes, two years in science and social studies classes. What make health less important than the classes we have to spend more time in? In fact it could be argued that health educational classes are more important because it will affect every single one of us for the rest of our lives.