Are we really supporting the wellness efforts?

Building administrators can be considered true managers of their buildings. Their major priorities were to ensure that the parents were happy, create a safe learning environment, and keep the bus schedules on track. Education was perceived as a business that produced poor quality results and was in dire need for some type of reform to save the nation’s poor educational system. Concerns reflected a lack of clear standards and assessment tools to observe how much students retained based on their teachings. These observations were a reflection of the findings from A Nation at Risk information. As a result of this reform, education’s focus changed from the management and providing an equal education to an educational system that focused on academic achievement.
Academic excellence is an outcome that should be a desire of school leaders and it can be achieved if the proper policies are in place to support the missions and goals of the schools. Federal and state policies challenge local school systems to develop policies that will support their efforts to improve a particular area in education. As these policies are made, it is the responsibility of the superintendent to ensure that the necessary individuals obtain the policies as well as ensuring that the information is effectively disseminated throughout the system and understood by all employees that are affected. One policy that stands out is the wellness policy.
The United States Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service placed an emphasis on healthy schools. It was evident that schools played an integral role in promoting student health, preventing childhood obesity, and poor nutrition and physical inactivity. All schools were charged to create policies that explained nutrition education, physical activity, and other school based activities designed to promote student wellness. Sample policies were given to states, who in-turn distributed them to the local school districts. The Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act of 2006 also played a significant role in the nutrition programs in the district where the writer is employed. This act regulated the content and availability of foods to children at schools.
The regulations cover foods that are sold in schools a la carte, vending machines, and snack bars. It is also related to the foods that are made available on school grounds. To comply with the policy, immediate changes were made. Parents in the writer’s school district commented that the healthy items were not cost effective. These healthy items included fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and calcium rich foods. Health experts have also commented that the government may need to consider lowering prices of the more nutritious foods. Whether the government decides to decrease the prices or not, obesity remains to be a public health problem. Policy and legislative actions, interventions, marketing restrictions, and preventive actions by schools, individuals, family and social interventions are key factors and can contribute to the decrease of the number of obese children in America.
As building principal, I have seen the amount of ice cream sales, students purchasing school breakfast and lunches decrease. I have not seen a push for additional exercise in our particular system, but wellness is the big issue. We have a wellness police that comes in our lunchrooms to be sure that the students have ample opportunity to eat their lunch before distributing ice cream to students. Where do we draw the line?