Q&A: Pat Cooper, Student Wellness Expert

When Pat Cooper took over as superintendent of Mississippi’s impoverished McComb School District, students were acting up, dropping out and failing to realize anything close to their full academic potentials. Cooper helped turn things around, and he did so by focusing on student health. As keynote speaker at this year’s School Wellness Conference in Anaheim Oct. 1-2, Cooper will describe how McComb students flourished when the district implemented the Coordinated School Health, Wellness and Safety Model. In his new job as the CEO of the Early Childhood and Family Learning Foundation in New Orleans, Cooper hopes to bring the same healing to the children of that hurricane-ravaged city.

What happened in McComb? How did a student wellness program wind up improving students’ reading scores?

When I came to McComb we all sat down—school people, community people—and asked: “What’s important? Is it important to have the highest test scores in the state and a 30 to 40 percent dropout rate and obese kids, and all the issues that go along with being unhealthy and not attending school?” Or is it better to say: “We’re going to have good test scores, and we’re going have the healthiest kids in the state, and they’re all going to graduate ready to go ahead and take on the next part of their lives”? We all decided that we had to take care of our kids. To do that we had to keep them in school, even if that brings down our test scores a little bit. What we found was that by helping our kids get and stay healthy, our test scores went up, our attendance rates when up, our graduation rates went up, our suspension rates went down, all the things that you want to have happen in a school happened.

How did you first get interested in student health?

When I was teaching mentally disabled and emotionally disturbed teenagers in Baton Rouge, La., I realized that many of these kids started school experientially deficient. These kids would arrive at kindergarten already developmentally behind, without an adequate vocabulary and, in most cases, in ill health. They were obese or had asthma or diabetes or needed behavior medication. When they started off behind, and nobody intervened, they got worse and worse and worse. I concluded we were creating a lot of our special education population.

How?

Because we didn’t do the proper things at the very beginning to get these students in a position where they could learn and where teachers could teach, we just lost them over time. When I took over as the assistant superintendent for special education for the state of Louisiana, we looked at the fact that our special ed numbers were unusually high. We found that in many, many cases the kids were not only academically deficient, but they also had an accompanying physical deficiency. That’s when I decided I wanted to be a school superintendent, and that I wanted to try the Coordinated School Health Model.

Can you describe briefly what that model is?

The Centers for Disease Control has developed a model for comprehensive school health that’s based on [Abraham] Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which concludes that children cannot thrive and realize their full potentials unless their basic physical needs are met. When I became superintendent in the West Louisiana Parish in Louisiana, and we implemented the Coordinated School Health Model—sure enough, within three to four years we were seeing some major changes. Once we had kids exercising, eating the right foods, and once we had kids being able to see nurses, and have access to therapy and counseling if they needed—all of a sudden, the academic scores went up, the attendance rates went up, all those kinds of things you want to have happen happened. That’s when I got sold on it.

Did you get resistance initially from parents or school board members?

No, because we made sure that the public was involved in this every step of the way. A lot of the public didn’t understand the Maslow laws, but they certainly understood what Maslow was saying. And so once we explained that to them—that we knew a lot of kids came to school without everything that they need in order to function—then it was an easy sell. When you got right down to it, most of the people in our community cared more about our kids and the quality of their lives than they did about having the highest test scores. But they had to be talked to, because all they hear is hype and publicity about test scores. That’s not what most of them believe is most important in the first place.

How would you advise school boards to support this kind of wellness effort in their own districts?

I think they have to do two things. One is, they have to go out and ask the teachers, “What would make life better for you?” Those teachers are going to want to talk about money, and that does have a lot to do with it. Teachers are also going to talk about how many problems their students come to school with. All of that revolves around Maslow. I would also hold community meetings. I would talk about what the citizens of this community would like to see their schools be like. Every time that’s been tried, there may be one or two who talk about test scores, but most of them are going to say, “We want safe schools. We want our kids to come to school and finish school. We want quality teachers.” They’re going to talk about all those things that the Coordinated School Health model does for students. And then it’s just a really quick jaunt to say, “Okay, let’s do for all kids what we think all parents should do for their children. All kids. The way to do that is to use the Coordinated School Health Initiative. If we do that, our teachers will be able to teach more effectively, and our kids will be able to learn more effectively, and yeah, by the way, our test scores are going to go up.