When Silvia Puma, CC ’10 and Anna Newman, BC ’12—coordinators of the Community Impact group Student Health Outreach—asked a group of local middle school students what being healthy meant, the results astounded them.
“A lot of the answers we got back were like, ‘Being healthy is being skinny,’ or ‘Being healthy is not eating,’” Puma said. “And it was something that really shocked us.”
The answers given prompted Puma and Newman to spearhead a new health education initiative titled Health Education and Resources for Teens, a program aimed specifically at nutrition education and outreach that is set to take off next week.
“We looked at the NYS [New York schools] standards for HE [health education] and they were pretty much nonexistent,” Newman said.
The program began when Puma and Newman attempted to change the school’s lunch menu to include healthier options, culminating in the survey to students.
“Some said they didn’t eat lunch,” Puma said. “They didn’t know how to distinguish between good and healthy foods.”
State law mandates that middle school students receive a half-year course in health education and high school students a half-unit course, and the curriculum recommended by the New York City Department of Education includes issues such as nutrition and physical fitness, HIV, STD and pregnancy prevention, and tobacco, alcohol, and drug prevention.
At the Mott Hall School where Puma and Newman work, health education is taught exclusively in the seventh grade for one 45-minute period a week, according to Melanie Thai, the school’s assistant principal. Nutrition, she said, is a part of the curriculum, but since the class is taught so sporadically, bringing in a supplementary curriculum is important for students.
Thai further explained that the nutrition education that will be provided by the volunteers is “definitely” something that is missing from most public schools. “That’s why we didn’t say no.”
But she also added that such programs would only be beneficial if scheduled in the early morning or after school, and not during hours when regular classes are held—indicating that health education should not come at the expense of academic subjects.
“We are accountable for test scores,” Thai said. “Our primary job is to make sure these kids do well in English and math. Health, art and music are on my second list of priorities, to be honest.”
According to some nutrition education advocates, it is precisely this attitude towards health education that accounts for it receiving limited resources.
“It comes down to the fact that health education is taken as light and a joke, which devalues it,” said Alicia Sinclair, an assistant professor in the Department of Health, Physical Education and Dance at Queensborough Community College, and former co-president of The Greater New York Society of Public Health Education.
At the same time, she said that, in light of larger issues that public schools face, this attitude is not surprising, and neither is the ostensible lack of advocacy on the part of parents for their children’s health education. What has gained the attention of grassroots advocates, she added, are issues like inadequately healthy school lunches, and their children’s lack of physical activity.
HEART is one of a few Columbia student-run volunteer programs that are seeking to fill the health education gaps that exist in local public school curricula. Peer Health Exchange, a nationally run program that recruits college students to teach in local high schools, and Health Education and Awareness League are among the others. HEAL student educators teach comprehensive health education to the middle school students of the Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, a school that previously had no other form of health education.
Next Monday, the seven student volunteers from HEART will begin teaching classes five days a week at Mott Hall, ensuring that each seventh grade class receives one lesson a week.
COMMENTS
Comments will be moderated in accordance with our comment policy