Teachers Get Coordinated School Health Training

A national public health expert told an audience of teachers last night, that Tennessee is the first state in the country to offer the Coordinated School Health program to all districts.

It’s a program from the Centers for Disease Control that seeks to coordinate eight different areas ranging from the cafeteria food to the school counselors, taking a holistic view of students’ health.

One of the founders of the program, Doctor Lloyd Kolbe, came to Nashville yesterday for a training conference for the state’s teachers. He says if children aren’t healthy, they can’t learn well.

“Tennessee is the leader in the world for what it’s doing today. It’s going to provide leadership for other states. In the past, people would say, ‘Yeah, we’d like to provide a school health coordinator, and a school health team in every district, but we just can’t do it.”

In Tennessee, 10 districts have been running the program as a pilot for several years. But this year, the General Assembly appropriated almost 16 million dollars to hire coordinators for nearly every school system in the state.

Part of the program will include measuring students’ body mass index and tracking those figures with grades. The program also requires districts to provide each student with at least 90 minutes of physical activity a week.