Question

What is meant by coordinated school health program?

Answer 1

Co-ordinated school health was a term orginally coined by the Centers for Disease Control to decribe child health programs that synthezise the different factors working togther to improve the health of the child including school health education, community involvement, family engagement, physical environment, health services and more

The new WSCC(Whole School, Whole Child, Whole Community) model includes 10 components, expanding upon the CSH components of Healthy and Safe School Environment and family/community involvement into 4 distinct components

The Coordinated Approach to Child Health (CATCH) program consists of 5 main components:

1. Class room lessons on each grade on nutrition, physical activity and screen time reduction
2. Enhanced physical education instruction and activities designed to maximize the time spent in moderate to vigorous physical activity
3. Guidance and resources for creating a school nutrition environment that promotes healthy foods and reinforces class room teaching
4. It provides a frame work for collaboration among administrators, teachers, nutrition staff, parents and other important stake holders
5. Implementation, training, technical assisstance and evaluation support, to ensure program fidelity and sustainability

Health education

CATCH provides a class room curriculum for each grade level that teaches student to identify, practice and adopt ,healthy eating and physical activity habits

Nutrition environment and services

CATCH impresses on students key lessons about the nutritional values of various food groups. It uses a stoplight model to break food into 3 groups:

• GO: describe food that are whole grain, unprocessed fruits and vegetables, lowest in fat ,contain no added sugars
• SLOW: food that are slightly processed and may have some added salt, fat or sugar
• WHOA: foods that are highest fat and sugars

The CATCH eat smarrt nutrition plan provides child nutrition services staff:

• Healthy menu planning,purchasing,preparation and promotional tips
• Introduction to cocordinated school health and facilitation with wellness policy concept
• Resources for planning healthy school parties

Physical education and physical activity

The CATCH PE curriculum is designed to increase the amount of moderate to vigorous physical activity and encourage children to engage in atleat 60 minutes of physical activity every day. Developmentally approrpriate activities , reinforce movement skills, sports involvement,physical fitnes, social dvelopment, skill competency and cognitive understanding about the importance of lifelong physical activity

Family engagement and community involvement

CATCH's parent materials encourage parents to teach their children healthy life style skills, become healthy role models and reinforce in school learning. In addition, engaging parents and community including agenda items for PTA meetings, tips for planning family/community activites

Couselling psychological and social services

Research have shown that implementing strategies that help students to eat healthy and be physically active can result in fewer behavioral problems, decreased rate of abseentesim, improved cognitive performance and higher academic acheivement