Minnesota Institute of Public Health

Just as there are natural connections in prevention, there is also need for students' learning experiences in school to be as integrated as are their daily lives. Their lives are inter-disciplinary and so must be their education. This is a critical lesson for those of us in prevention and health promotion to understand.

Educators do what they do because they are dedicated to the growth, learning, and development of their students. They also receive a regular full-court press from the rest of us who want them beyond teaching so-called academic basic skills, to help children eat right, exercise, don't drink, drug, or smoke; brush their teeth, wash their hands, reduce and prevent bullying, learn about sexual health, learn to drive a car, get screened for vision, hearing, scoliosis and a lot more, save the environment, buckle their seat belts, recognize stranger danger, build character and improve their mental health. And don't miss the bus home!

It's all good of course, but we need to recognize for teachers, the single most precious resource they have with their students is learning time on task. Running to schools with the latest curriculum topic we need them to inject into their already over-crowded school day does little more than to guilt and frustrate them, and to demonstrate an incredible insensitivity to what it's like to help kids learn.

With State and Foundation funding support, MIPH has brought schools child mental health curriculum, chemical health/ATOD prevention curriculum, diabetes lessons, recycling education, and an array of curriculum scope and sequence lessons in such things as lead poisoning prevention, sexual health education, violence awareness/prevention, and more. 

In doing so we've learned a few important lessons ourselves, such as:

• Use a Skeptical Teachers Committee who while agreeing the topic is important, are realistically caustic about when and how in the world such a new curriculum is to be integrated into an already over-burdened school day, and can therefore advise on the most sensible way to proceed.
• Integrate the curriculum, which by the way was the consensus advice of Skeptical Teachers. "Don't come to us with a special topic class to be crammed into every Tuesday 1:15-1:35 pm; rather bring us a pilot tested curriculum that could be a music lesson, reading lesson, math or social studies, art or science lesson. If we can fold it into what we do, (much like life is) our chance of using the curriculum is greatly improved."
• Have the materials there and ready! If we need to go to the library or research online to get basic information in order to teach what you propose, OR, if we need to spend a ton of time building and creating prototype materials before we actually being a lesson, then frankly, forget it!". Either the curriculum is use friendly, or it won't get used.

In health promotion education and prevention programming, schools are a tremendous resource. When we ask educators for their help, we need to do so with respect, empathy, and a practical sense of what their world is like. They've dedicated themselves as professionals to help young people learn and grow, and they are pleased to be part of the solution, to help improve the human condition.

They are pulled by the gods they answer to such adequate yearly progress, by suffocating budgets and education politics, and a high pressure world in a rewarding but all too often thankless job.

So in communicating with schools, let's start first with our ears; let's listen first. We need to get closer to knowing the reality of what schools are like. In collaboration, we can go forward from there.

- JJ