CSBA and Project LEAN win honors for student fitness  

The California School Boards Association and the state’s Project LEAN have received a $95,000 grant from the California Department of Justice to continue their efforts to give schoolchildren healthier food choices and get kids up and moving.

The joint CSBA-Project LEAN partnership also received a national honor earlier this month, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that the “Successful Students Through Healthy Food Policies” campaign had won an Innovation in Prevention Award.

The innovation awards, given for the first time last year, go to the workplace, educational, public-agency and faith-based organizations that are most effectively helping prevent and treat chronic diseases or underlying behavioral risk factors related to smoking, poor nutrition and lack of exercise.

Both the grant and the prevention award recognize an innovative partnership between CSBA and Project LEAN or Leaders Encouraging Activity and Nutrition, the joint program by the state Department of Health Services and the Public Health Institute to reduce the number of Californians who are obese.

Unlike conventional public health programs that send experts into communities armed with statistics and information about a given health problem, the Project LEAN/CSBA collaboration began by learning about their target community.

“We sought to understand first how school board members felt about healthy food policies and then how to best help school board members take action to institute them,” said Martin Gonzalez, CSBA’s Assistant Executive Director for Governance and Policy Services.

The project surveyed school board members to learn about the perceptions, motivations, barriers and mitigating factors that influence nutrition policy-making. This research also helped public health educators develop effective strategies for increasing interest in healthy school food policies.

Gonzalez said the state grant, from Salton Settlement Funds, will enable CSBA and Project LEAN to build upon the groundwork already laid by the Successful Students campaign, continue increasing the frequency with which school boards address nutrition and fitness issues and expand the number of school districts that enact healthy food and exercise policies.

Focus groups conducted by CSBA and Project LEAN indicated that school board members need hard data on the ways in which good nutrition helps students learn better and improves their school attendance in order to make health food policies a priority in their districts.

To that end, CSBA and Project LEAN compiled the “Healthy Food Policy Resource Guide,” an extensive step-by-step approach for establishing school policies and providing a school environment that helps students avoid sugary sodas and junk food. The resource manual describes case studies of successful school-based nutrition and exercise programs.

In addition, the collaborative effort conducted numerous trainings and workshops and provides on-going technical assistance to districts that are eager to improve student nutrition and fitness.

Related link:

• CSBA/Project LEAN Healthy Food Policy Resource Guide