Build Stronger Schools with ASCD's Healthy School Report Card
There are nearly 22 million school-loss days annually due to the common cold, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When you think about this statistic in concert with the numerous other health-related reasons students and teachers miss school—plus the soaring cost of health care coverage for school employees—school health becomes central to discussions about teacher and student achievement and a school's ability to function well.
School administrators know they can do more than order mass quantities of Airborne to keep their schools healthy, but where do they start? Aside from the daily headcount, how do you know if your school is healthy?
Creating a Healthy School Using the Healthy School Report Card: An ASCD Action Tool provides a mechanism to assess school health practices, identify and prioritize changes that will improve the school health environment, and incorporate those changes into a school improvement plan.
Dave Lohrmann, associate professor and graduate coordinator in the Department of Applied Health Science at Indiana University, developed the Healthy School Report Card (HSRC) to provide administrators extensive guidance on “getting involved in school health, engaging school personnel and decision makers in school health, developing status assessment reports based on HSRC survey results, and preparing healthy school improvement plans,” says Lohrmann.
James Roberts, assistant superintendent of Batesville Community School Corporation in Indiana, uses the HSRC to develop an ongoing Healthy School Improvement Plan in his district. He believes the HSRC is “an important tool because it provides a continuous improvement structure for our Coordinated School Health Program in Batesville.” Roberts adds that his team “used the HSRC to assist us in our planning, which led us to conduct some interventions. We studied the results—comparing them back to the standards of the HSRC—and acted accordingly, based upon those results.”
“When the HSRC results are used to develop a Healthy School Improvement Plan, a school or school [district] has a solid plan to guide them toward important and sustainable change through coordinated school health,” notes Dru Szczerba, director of cancer prevention and health care systems initiatives at the Great Lakes Division of the American Cancer Society. Creating a Healthy School Using the Healthy School Report Card: An ASCD Action Tool “is key in helping school teams make sustainable changes in their school environments that will improve academic achievement and impact the quality of life for students both now and in the future,” adds Szczerba.
In her “Message from the President” column in the November 2005 Education Update, ASCD Immediate Past President Mary Ellen Freeley notes that educating the whole child means more than current fixations on test scores. It also means each student “must have access to health care, good nutrition, and exercise to be physically ready to meet academic demands.” Health experts agree: schools that commit to systemwide programs promoting physically, emotionally, and socially healthy teachers and students perform better than those that don't.
School administrators and health officials believe using ASCD's school-systemwide Creating a Healthy School Using the Healthy School Report Card action tool supports healthy schools, and healthy schools support learning.