Session: Together for Healthy and Successful School Policies: Understanding the Opportunities, Needs, and Challenges in Creating Evidence-Based Policy (Society for Prevention Research 26th Annual Meeting)

Prevention science is increasingly being incorporated into state-level education policy initiatives throughout the United States that focus on targeting students’ well-being beyond academic achievement. Policies covering everything from promoting healthier school nutrition to prevent childhood obesity to creating more evidence-based approaches for bullying prevention to incorporating social and emotional learning standards to promote healthy youth development have proliferated over the past decade. However, there remains a need for coordinated efforts that integrate multiple components of healthy school environments to advance the common goal of improving social, health, and academic outcomes for all students. Whereas separate initiatives must compete for policymakers’ limited capacity, coordinated initiatives can leverage opportunities within the broader framework. Building on the CDC’s Coordinated School Health approach and incorporating a “whole child” focus, the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) framework promotes healthy school environments to support students’ health and well-being comprehensively and equitably. The framework covers ten components: health education; physical education and activity; nutrition environment and services; health services; counseling, psychological and social services; social and emotional climate; physical environment; employee wellness; family engagement, and; community engagement. This session presents three papers focused on efforts to understand how to better integrate healthy school policies to more holistically cover the WSCC framework.

The first paper establishes the current status of policies at the state and local level at covering the WSCC model. The work represents the first comprehensive mapping of policies across all fifty states, D.C., and territories as well as a strategic sample of 480 school districts to explore the alignment between policy, evidence-base practice, and the ten components of the WSCC model. The paper focuses on identifying opportunities to better inform policymaking around the WSCC framework.

The second paper explores how key stakeholders, including students, educators, and policymakers, are thinking about healthy school environments and their understanding of the connections between components and perceived gaps in current practice.

The final paper presents the perspective of a state educational agency tasked with implementing comprehensive, evidence-based healthy schools policies and their experience with the successes and challenges of fulfilling the goals of such policies.