Family & Community Students & Families Student Support, Career & Education
Nutrition, Health and Safety

Health and Academics: Making the Link Technical Assistance Kit

Spring 2000

Dear Health Coordinators:

It gives me great pleasure to send you Health and Academics: Making the Link Technical Assistance Kit, a technical assistance tool provided by the Health, Safety and Student Support Services Cluster. This kit was developed in response to concerns raised by health coordinators who had requested support in promoting local district comprehensive school health programs. This product highlights research links between the provision of comprehensive school health programs and academic performance.

A comprehensive school health program can enable schools to create a challenging and rigorous academic environment while nurturing the emotional and physical health of their students. It is well known that healthy behavior can have many long-term benefits. In the short run, however, healthy behaviors can also help students perform better in school. For example, we know that alcohol use, tobacco use, and other drug use, teen pregnancy, exposure to violence, and poor nutrition and physical inactivity all impact the ability of students to have good attendance, to learn, and to perform well academically in school. When engaging in healthy practices, students are better able to achieve on a higher and more productive level.

All of these materials can be used individually or combined to promote the value of your district's comprehensive school health education program. Presentations can be made in your community, to your advisory councils or to your school faculty on a professional development day, to parent groups, to school administrators and school committees.

We were delighted to discover a body of research that indeed enabled us to make these important connections between the provision of comprehensive school health programs and academic success.

Included in this kit are:

• Health and Academics: Making the Link videotape cassette:

  This 16 minute video provides a broad overview of the value of Comprehensive School Health Programs in relation to academic performance, with an emphasis on physical education, nutrition and pregnancy prevention. I am very proud that three Massachusetts school districts are highlighted. There is an introduction by both the United States Surgeon General Satcher and me and a conclusion by the Commissioner Koh, MA Department of Public Health.

• The Role of Comprehensive School Health Education Programs in the Link Between Health and Learning: A Literature Review:
  

  This literature review compiles the most recent and substantial research as it relates the connection between health, comprehensive school health programming and academic performance. A bibliography is included.

• Health and Academics: Making the Link PowerPoint presentation:
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  This PowerPoint presentation is on a computer disk and is another tool which can be used to highlight the research links with educational outcomes. The information provided comes from the literature review as well as supporting documents such as the MA Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Included on the disk along with the PowerPoint presentation are talking points to assist you in presentation.

• Health and Academics: Making the Link brochure:
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  This brochure is a companion tool to be offered to audiences and includes an abbreviated version of the PowerPoint presentation. In addition to the color brochure, we have provided you with a black and white master copy. The color master is also included as a document on the computer disk for replication purposes.

• Health and Academics: Making the Link color overhead transparencies:

  Depending upon the venue of your presentation, these can be used in lieu of the PowerPoint presentation. We have included a black and white master of the transparencies in smaller scale with the accompanying talking points for each slide. This product is virtually the same as the PowerPoint presentation.

In order to garner support for your program it is important to clearly articulate its relevance to the broader school district concerns. Emphasize the relationship of your program and coordinated efforts to overall education reform and provide examples of your own models of success! We hope that you will adapt these resources to use in conjunction with your own community needs assessment and with your curriculum adaptation of the revised Massachusetts Comprehensive Health Curriculum Framework. Both the video and the disk are protected so that they will not be damaged. You are welcome to make changes and additions to the documents to suit your local needs, with the indication that your product has been adapted from the MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education set of materials in this package.

It is indeed a pleasure to present you with these materials and I hope you will put them to use in the promotion of your comprehensive school health program in your school district.

Sincerely,

David P. Driscoll
Commissioner of Education