Program helps diagnose health of wellness programs

More than 120 school district nutritionists, health advisers and other educators gathered at the California Farm Bureau Federation’s offices in Sacramento last month to attend a daylong workshop, “Policy in Action: Implementation and Evaluation of Your Local School Wellness Policy.”

A coalition of organizations including CSBA, the California Department of Education, California Project LEAN, the Dairy Council of California, California Action for Healthy Kids and others teamed to stage the seminar, which has also been presented in Tulare, Riverside and Los Angeles counties. Plans are under way for another presentation in Redding.

CSBA’s portion of the workshop, “Monitoring for Success,” featured Martin Gonzalez, assistant executive director for Governance and Policy Services, and Karen Bellacera, student wellness consultant. They explained the role of school boards, why monitoring wellness programs is essential, and how to interpret results and use them to improve the programs.

“We’re trying to increase awareness and provide districts with resources, tools and training as they strive to create a healthier school environment,” Gonzalez said. “Many are already fully engaged in implementation, and we want them to have an awareness about monitoring and evaluation and its importance in creating and sustaining success.”
The benefits of monitoring include ensuring that the board’s expectations are being met, that the district is operating legally and that it is accountable to its community.

“Our main goal was to instill in the workshop attendees an understanding of why monitoring is important,” Bellacera said. “They are in the implementation phase now but need to start thinking about how they will track the data in order to provide it to the school board.”

Subjects for monitoring abound: They include the cafeteria environment; quantity and quality of nutrition education and physical education; facilities and equipment; student health and fitness; and academic performance, student absenteeism and classroom behavior. Methods for monitoring range from questionnaires and interviews to systematic document review, focus groups and beyond.

CSBA is developing a monitoring tool to guide school staff members in organizing the data they collect, drawing heavily from existing information readily available in the district. ”Monitoring for Success: A Student Wellness Implementation Monitoring Report and Guide” will be available later this winter, Bellacera said.

“Our work here is about helping board members and districts along the policy development process,” Gonzalez said. “We want to make sure they not only have the policies in place, but the help they need to implement and monitor them as well. Adopting policy is one step; implementing policy is another. We have to make sure that we evaluate the effectiveness of our programs because that is how the board holds the system accountable.”

CSBA, in partnership with California’s Department of Education and Department of Health Services, will co-sponsor a two-day conference on student wellness in Anaheim Oct. 1-2 to build on established momentum for healthier school environments.