In August 2013, I accepted the Health Promotion Practice Award on behalf of ASCD at the 21st International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE) World Conference in Pattaya, Thailand. This award recognizes ASCD's achievements and contributions to promoting a holistic approach to education and fostering greater alignment between the health and education sectors.
In 2006, I convened the Commission on the Whole Child. This commission, composed of leading thinkers, researchers, and practitioners drawn from a wide variety of sectors—including the education and health sectors—was charged with recasting the definition of a successful learner from one whose achievement is measured solely by academic tests to one who is knowledgeable, emotionally and physically healthy, civically inspired, engaged in the arts, prepared for work and economic self-sufficiency, and ready for the world beyond formal schooling.
The resulting Whole Child Initiative, launched in the middle of the No Child Left Behind years in the United States, changed the debate about the role and purpose of education. At its core, the initiative declared that each child, in each school, and in each community, deserves to be healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. It was born out of a belief that children cannot learn unless they are healthy and safe.
The commission was the start of the whole child approach that has become a key initiative guiding ASCD's work and that of its 74 partner organizations—who, in turn, have promoted the understanding that a coordinated, comprehensive approach to health and education is the most effective means by which to achieve positive results for child wellness, growth, and educational success.
A healthy environment is a positive learning environment that
- Weaves health and well-being into the future of the school;
- Aligns efforts to promote effective teaching and learning;
- Views family and community members as partners, not players;
- Is a conduit between the school and community; and
- Adopts and adapts efforts to suit the needs of the school.
Prior to the start of the IUHPE World Conference, ASCD, in collaboration with the International School Health Network, organized a Global School Health Symposium. This event brought together many of the world's prominent health, education, and school health experts and engaged them in a dialogue about how to best align the health and education sectors. One of the first outcomes that arose from the symposium was the understanding that we should not seek alignment—that is, we should not seek a system where each sector sits alongside one another and cooperates. Rather, we should seek integration.
The Global School Health Symposium also recognized the need to develop a statement in response to a question posed by Margaret Chan, the director of the World Health Organization (WHO), in June: "How can health arguments be made compelling for much more influential sectors with their own distinct mandates and obligations?"
We believe that such a statement—and subsequent recommendations developed by various organizations in regions around the globe that are set to be introduced, crafted, expanded, and signed at a series of global symposia—will jump-start the conversation and action to integrate health and education.
The influence of ASCD's vision to truly align the health and education sectors can also be viewed in our collaboration with the U. S. Centers for Disease Control to develop the next evolution of the Coordinated School Health Model (originally proposed by Diane Allensworth and Lloyd Kolbe in 1987) and place it within a whole child framework. This work, currently under way, aims to embed health and well-being into the education processes. It seeks to ultimately ensure that education no longer views or needs to view health as an extra or adjunct to education, but rather as foundational to an effective education system.