Mapping the Healthy School Policy Landscape from the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child Framework: Findings from a State and District Policy Analysis

CDC’s WSCC framework provides a holistic approach for addressing student health and well-being. Existing efforts to document the landscape of state laws and school district policies under the WSCC framework are largely piecemeal, covering in-depth analyses of only small segments of the broader framework (e.g. school discipline, nutrition and physical education, bullying) or lacking sufficient detail to conduct meaningful analyses (e.g., only bill tracking). A comprehensive analysis of the “sum of the parts” is critical to understanding the extent of WSCC representation in state laws and school district policies nationwide and identifying policy opportunities. Further, prior research has documented that states and districts often have complementary and, in some cases, reinforcing policies that establish the policy landscape for the school environment. Thus, it will be important for decisionmakers, practitioners, and advocates to understand where and how elements of WSCC are typically addressed in state law and district level policies.

Using WSCC as a guidepost along with existing national standards and guidelines and prior state law research in the WSCC component areas, we developed a policy coding framework for evaluating the scope of state laws and regulations and district policies relative to the 10 WSCC component areas. The state laws were compiled through primary legal research using LexisNexis and Westlaw. District policies were compiled via Internet research with email/telephone follow-up for 480 public and charter school districts located in 20 states that were selected based on: (1) the four largest states by population; (2) the 2 highest obesity rates; (3) the 2 lowest obesity rates; (4) the 2 highest bullying rates; (5) the 2 lowest bullying rates; (6) the 2 highest chronic absenteeism rates; (7) the 2 lowest chronic absenteeism rates, and; (8) 4 purposefully selected of the remaining. All districts in each selected state were then stratified based on their urbanicity, diversity, and income level and 24 districts form each state were selected for a total sample of 480 districts. All state laws and district policies were evaluated using the policy coding framework described above.

This presentation will discuss findings the evaluation of the state laws and district policies relative to WSCC, identify inequities in WSCC coverage by state and/or district characteristics, and will highlight gaps and opportunities for additional evidence-based policymaking.