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Welcome, I think we'll get started. It is a four minutes after three.

Thank you for joining the Highmark foundation school grants and awards program webinar.

Thank you for registering today and spending some time with us. My name is Jane Brooks and I'm program officer for Highmark Foundation, and your main contact for all things, school grants.

This meeting is being recorded and will be available afterwards. If you are unable to stay for the entire program, or if you would like to share with colleagues who may not have been able to participate today.

If at any. If at any point you feel, or if you required, you would like to ask a question, please use the question and answering feature opera through zoom, and we will review as many of those questions that we can, at the end of the program during the question and answering session. So, at this point I'd like to introduce you have on coke who is the president behind our foundation to say a few words and to welcome you.

Thank you, Jane Good afternoon, everyone. I'm so glad you could join us today. I understand we have over 200 people who registered to be a part of today's webinar and to learn a little bit more about our school grants program.

And we're so excited by that. And Highmark, I don't know if you know we have a very long history The Highmark Foundation has a long history of supporting schools throughout Pennsylvania and West Virginia, that's our, that's our marketplace that's where we do all of our grant making, and over 10 years we are celebrating 10 years of our school grants program is so near and dear to my heart I don't know what to tell you.

We just love and support schools so much.

The need is so great and we are constantly.

You know, trying to rethink about how we support you and where you are. So we've awarded over $3.4 million to over 700 schools impacting over 600,000 youth.

And this idea of support for Child Health we call it child health and wellness is really consistent with our own goals around Family Health, ensuring that we can illustrate effectiveness for early intervention and preventive health programs.

That's the key right this old whole idea around prevention is key, not only as a child, it carries with you your entire life around prevention. And so we look for best practices we look for opportunities to make sure that we can connect and meet our children where they are. And so that opens up a multitude of opportunities and we take advantage of them at the Highmark foundation. So, we're so delighted that you're here today, we've connected over the years with such wonderful partners and they're here today and Jane will introduce you to them, but they've been great partners to us. The Highmark foundation doesn't provide programs and services itself, we invest in partners in the community, that do extraordinary work on the benefit for the benefit of children and their families. And so we are so glad you could be here today, we're going to ask you a couple of questions as well we need to know some things right now because of coven and the things that are happening in schools so you're going to get a couple of questions Jane's going to share that with you in a moment, but we want to hear from you. Also, through your questions. Towards the end of the presentation, but again welcome for being here.

We are so honored to have you as a part of today's conversation, spread the word.

As you learn about what's happening here today, and thank you for your presence, Jane.

So as you've mentioned before we get to be presentations from our technical partners, we didn't want to get a little information from you as the participants, because you are doing this work every single day within our schools, and you know with the challenges of probe and 19 and the increases of the variant cases we wanted to get a sense of what your schools are doing now and what you plan to do for the next six months which will take us to the end of the school year.

That will allow us an opportunity to perhaps reevaluate the current program as it stands with our traditional grants and also give us an opportunity to maybe rethink about how we want to provide this program moving forward so it's really important for us to get this information from you so feel free. It's too simple questions I'll give you about two minutes or so to to answer it. And the second question is really the most important because it provides you an opportunity to let us know in your own words.

You know what you're dealing with and how you see funding potential funding available to you how you can best use that so I'm going to launch the poll and give you a couple of minutes to complete that, and I'll be right back with you so just bear with me here, and I'll get this rolling.

Now we're going to move on to positive school climate and our presenter is Leah gal Kalki from the Center for Safe Schools. Yeah.

Thank you, Jane. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm so excited to be here this afternoon with all of you. and talking today about positive school climate. This has been a challenging year and a half working on two full years in our schools. So building and supporting a positive school climate is is really at the forefront for all of us in this category in this climate category and grantee should look at evidence based strategies and practices.

When you're submitting your application and developing the strategy to build a positive school climate and culture.

In, in these times we've experienced a lot of trauma school disconnectedness equity issues and all of these things have become the focal point for many of our schools.

Research tells us that to build a sustainable positive climate that fosters youth development and the learning necessary.

We need to look at evidence based strategies things that have been proven effective.

We, you don't really need to go out and recreate the wheel. There are lots of opportunities lots of strategies out there that work that are available to you so take a look at those things in this category traditional bullying prevention programs are eligible mindfulness programs that include showrooms. We've actually seen an increase in those requests, a lot of need for kids to just take a minute and and take a step back, social emotional learning programs such as self awareness self management skills, responsible decision making and more applications must demonstrate how all of these items are part of the larger, larger systemic program or systemic strategy just as Diana was describing any standalone practices is not going to be a, a quality application and not going to get the most positive results for your school. We do know from the research that there are some items that are evidence based and are proven effective and I've listed those for you here I'll talk about them for a few minutes.

Many of these come from the old days bullying prevention program, one of the most research based and proven effective bullying prevention programs, if not the most research based improvement in practice, effective bullying prevention programs in the world.

And as you'll see that some of these strategies coincide with what Diana was mentioning, and even Michelle. These are comprehensive whole school strategies, it's not just a standalone item, you know, one, One assembly, one activity.

One air purifier are not going to make the whole environment better for the entire for the building, you need to think of this in a systemic whole school approach.

Also, you need to take a baseline you need to take a look at where you are.

To start, so do school climate surveys in Pennsylvania, we have a free school climate survey to every school.

There are other ones that are out there for purchase. The National schools climate Safety Center has it has a whole school climate survey, that's available for purchase, but you need to take a baseline and see where you are, what are the specific needs.

Where are things happening, are your kids already connected and are doing great, or what can you do to improve that. So, you know, those are the things that you need to take a look at.

And then you need to just as that. The other presenters were mentioning form a group to guide this process. So, you know, you met you put rd, there's committees for everything in schools we know that.

So you know what committee does this building a school climate best fit, you know, where can we put that.

But you need that group to help guide implementation. The other thing you need to put in place from the beginning, is how to transition people off of that committee, because you will burn them out if you leave them there for five years.

So how are you going to do that and and build their capacity and move them on and bring in somebody new when it becomes necessary. It's also very important to provide professional development for all of your staff that's everybody in the building, everybody who works with the kids, everybody who works, has a hand in, you know, helping kids learn building those relationships, making the school a better place.

All of the adults in the building need to have that professional development.

You also need to establish and enforce your guidelines and your expectation. So what are the rules around behaviors.

Make sure that everybody's on the same page in that, and that they're consistently enforced. So everybody is enforcing and knows knows the rules and knows how to enforce those roles and are consistent in that.

It's also important to talk with the students about the environment, about the, the school issues the school concerns, what are the positive things that are happening in the school, what are the kids, seeing that's working, get that information from the, from the students if they, especially at the secondary level, have those kids involved in some way with that committee that's guiding your process, increase and adults who supervision where issues are concerning use that data that you've collected and increase the supervision were necessary and intervene consistently when you see behaviors.

One of the groups of kids that I was talking with yesterday was an awesome positive experience was that they said, every time and adult seas or knows about something happening in our school, they do something about it.

That's one of your climate boosters, right away you adults know what to do know how to intervene and actually do intervene on a consistent basis. It's also important to bring in your partner's parents are your partners caregivers are your partners, grandparents caring for children are your partner, bring those, those groups in, find out what their needs are, what their issues and concerns are, and how they can support your implementation of any evidence based program in your school, and then provide ongoing support ongoing professional development to your staff, ongoing support in looking at the data, reviewing that data. And, you know, supporting that comedian in ways that might not be money, giving them time to meet, giving them, you know, a room to meet and given them maybe some, some healthy food and healthy snacks for their meeting.

But a way, you know, to show that you're the leadership is supportive of those activities.

All of these things have been proven effective and our evidence base.

I'm happy to talk with anyone about what some of those evidence based programs are. I haven't listed any of those there.

It's a good idea to take a look at the castle website. It is casel.org.

There are lots of evidence based strategies on that website. The obvious bullying prevention program is the most evidence based bullying prevention program out there I can talk with you about that one.

I can problem solve is another good one.

Responsive Classroom is another great program, these are all school wide approaches. The other thing you need to take into consideration when you're looking at any evidence based program is this is not a one and done.

None of these items are a one and done thing. They have to be continued over time, and it, it has to be understood from the beginning that this is now the way that we will practice in our building.

This is now the way that we will conduct business and our building. This is how we will support our students and our staff. One of the main things that I'm seeing right now in schools is staff turnover it.

It's scary, actually, at this point.

So I think it's important for us to understand that a positive school climate support staff, respect retention.

Staff retention helps students be more successful in school, these things all go together and it's so important.

If you have any questions about that, please feel free to reach out to me. At this time I'd like to turn it over to the next presenter.

Okay we are running.

Almost six minutes so I am going to end the poll. Again, I will send this out to everybody that's registered today so that you have an opportunity to respond.

Perhaps after you've given some thought to it as well if some of you haven't had an opportunity to really think about it so I'm going to end the poll now.

And based on the results of those that did respond. So Jane it looked like in person 95% felt that within the next six months.

There will be in person learning in school so that's that's a good sign. That's a very very good sign.

Again, thank you for sharing all that information, again, we really appreciate it. It's going to help us frame, how we move forward with the grants program.

And, you know, maybe reevaluate as we said to add some other offerings, or update some of the offerings. So thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it.

We're going to move forward now.

The Highmark foundation school grants and awards program consists of three components, traditional school grants, which is the bulk of what we're talking about today.

It's the four categories of environmental health, healthy eating and physical activity, positive school climate and school based health, the grants are up to 70 $500 per grams.

Applications are due on Friday, April 1 2022, we make notifications in mid June with award checks to those that are successful in mid August of 2022.

We do have.

But there are needs, different needs from state to state and also from county to county so you know we recognize that there are different needs for everyone.

The traditional grants are as I said the bulk and that's the bulk of the presentation will be focusing on that it's open to public private parochial charter vocational high schools and intermediate units in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

The second component is the Advancing Excellence and school nursing awards awards program where we recognize nurses that are doing outstanding work in our schools every single day.

We know that one in five children come to school with a chronic condition, and the school's nurses are dealing with things that are over and above what they would normally handle in school and it's not just handing out band aids and ice packs and, all of those things that are often thought that the nurses are taking care of. So those nominations again are also do on November, or April 1 awardees will receive up to 1500 dollars which they can use for their own personal, professional development, or to be used for supplies and materials for their nurses suite, and we like. Now in the days of coven we make the announcement on national school nurse day if things were to clear up we will do check presentations, we submit a press release, so that the to the local newspapers and then everyone gets recognition.

The third component is the supportive services, health grants and that's a specialized program for high need schools, there's a particular criteria that a school needs to meet in order to apply for those grants and that will be discussed on a later slide.

The instructions and the link to the online application can be found on our website at Highmark foundation.org in the header page on our homepage, you'll click on the Apply now.

And there's also an opportunity for you to download the instruction booklet. This is the cover of this year's booklet, it gives you information on the timeline that, who are the technical partners are, what kinds of programs, you can apply for etc.

Then, who are the technical partners are, what kinds of programs, you can apply for etc. It's also an opportunity to keep it handy. So if you need a reminder for the due dates, it's also included in there, the online application does require an account, so if you have not applied to Highmark foundation in the past you will first need to create an account before you can actually submit the application.

Another important point is to have your district or County Board of Education w nine available on your computer for upload. You cannot move forward in the process until you upload the W nine and that's really important for us and our accounts payable department to have the, the proper address and a tax ID number so that we can you know get the awards checks process and mail to you in August. So, the W nine is really crucial to the process and state sales tax exemption form are not acceptable.

We need the W nine form.

More than anything else so state sales tax exemption for us are not the direct link to the application is located at the bottom of the slide, I'm not going to read it out.

But that is the link that will be found in the awards program booklet. As a reminder, it's, again, keep this booklet handy download it at any time off the website, and has lots of great information for you.

So this time, I'm going to turn it over to our technical partners.

The first category is environmental health, and we have Michelle Naccarati-Chapkis from the women for a healthier environment.

Sharp exchange. Good afternoon.

Are you seeing the healthy eating and physical activity slide on your screen.

You shall. Thanks Jane Good afternoon.

Are you seeing the healthy eat.

Testing lunch.

Sean. Thanks Jane Good afternoon.

Are you seeing the healthy eating and physical activity slide on your screen you able to scroll back to the environment physical health side.

Slide. Um, I had the environmental health slide on my screen, you have it on your screen because everyone else see that one.

That's looking like it's frozen on the healthy eating slide that I'm seeing in the chat room and take over sharing.

Thanks.

Some people are seeing no slides.

I'll talk, as we're getting that slide up, and then that'll keep us on track here with a little bit of time. Good afternoon everyone. Michelle karate chop yes and I'm executive director at women for healthy environment and our nonprofit organization has three main program areas that really focus on the health of children and the caregivers those who spend their days with them through healthy homes Healthy Schools and healthy early learning initiatives.

And I'm here today to talk a little bit about Healthy Schools one of our main core program areas. As you all know, up there we go.

As you all know, we've got we're in the northeast and I have a lot of information and numbers here on the slide because in the northeast.

We have a aging infrastructure across our communities and so it's something that we're all facing and so I wanted to make you all know it aware that this is not unique to your neighborhood to your community to your school it's something that we all collectively have an opportunity to address together so the United States Government Accountability Office had done a survey and look at the average age of school buildings through about 40 years old.

We did our own internal analysis across Pennsylvania and we found that those school buildings were actually even older about 60 years on average. And so as a result of that that takes a lot of maintenance takes renovation over time.

And it takes a lot of opportunity to think about what are in those school buildings when they were built 16 years ago that we perhaps are addressing today as it relates to environmental health.

And so it's things like thinking about PCBs, which are some of the chemicals that were used in lighting Dallas and school buildings back in the day. Now also using cooking and school buildings it's things like lead, as you all have had a lot of exposure around leaded drinking water in radon, for instance in our school buildings.

And so with all of those different, unique things that are environmental challenges we want to think about solutions ways to addressing those in school buildings.

As you all know, there's about 180 school days, and let's average that at about seven hours in a school building so we're over 1000 hours a year that we're spending time at our school buildings, and as such we want them for our most vulnerable population, our children to be healthy in those spaces, as well as the school personnel who spend decades often in the school environments.

When we think about children, they're not just little adults they have a higher respiratory or metabolic rate. They have an image or blood brain barrier.

They're rapidly dividing cells and have an immature immune system and because of all of that, we know that it's really critical to protect the spaces in which they spend their days, and that's why this program is so critical and valuable to the school community.

I want to encourage all of you to be as you're thinking about your applications and thinking about the spaces that you're in, think about who's going to come together to administer that and I often want to, you know, promote and highlight the work of committees in these spaces, you know, think about a wellness committee that you all can mobilize around or a PTA committee or a sustainability committee whatever that looks like in the space that you're in, but it's just always powerful, and it's always impactful to have the voices of many around your community, and even having students participate in that process is such a great learning opportunity for for youth in our school building so that's one of the things that, you know, I think about as it relates to creating a committee who who can think about what the needs are and how you can collectively as full personnel respond to that.

I think I'm the slide went off of the environment is do you all see it. There you go. Perfect. We'll stay on there for one minute. So, 60,000, that's enough for public schools all across the country that experience these environmental conditions that cause things like asthma allergy symptoms in, in school buildings, cognitive impairment, and you know just general I ear, nose, throat irritation and so we're all in this together as I mentioned earlier, and we know that 20,000 school buildings contains some of these chemicals of concern because a lot of the regulations that guide our chemicals weren't written until the late 1970s. And so if our buildings are 60 plus years old.

They have a lot of various products and chemicals in the building products that were that were incorporated before we had a lot of the strong science and evidence based information today that says that these aren't necessarily all that healthy for us and so we want to make sure that we're addressing some of these. If you think about high performance indicators in school buildings that last section here, it these are all of the different things that you can think about doing and applying and you're to making it healthier and safer learning environment for students and staff, things that improve air quality and address thermal health moisture, Dustin pest in buildings, safety and security water quality air quality, what is the noise level the lighting level and ventilation. And so if the pandemic has taught us anything and brought this environmental health issue to the forefront. It's that we've spent a lot of time looking at cleaning and maintenance supplies and products in our school buildings.

What are those that were using it Are they all that natural, healthy and safe, are they effective, but yet Are they the least toxic available but we know work.

So those are some of the things that we've spent a lot of time with school buildings on is in terms of, you know, making sure that they've got adequate and effective green cleaning supplies but that they work well.

And that they meet the needs and demands of the, of the school personnel, and then ventilation is something also that we've spent a lot of time on and learning more about and there's been a lot of emphasis on that is making sure that we've got good ventilation systems in our school buildings, taking students outside What does that outdoor classroom environment element look like. These are all some of the things that you can think about incorporating when you're developing your ideas for grants.

We know studies show time and time again when you've got a healthy building environment, it leads to greater academic achievement and that's what we're trying to all do here as you had mentioned earlier in the preventative strategy, how can we be preventative in terms of thinking about all of these great resources and opportunities that a grant can provide to your building. So as you're thinking about that I'll just close out with some ideas about, you know, thinking about how to clear the air inside your building clear the air outside your building, thinking about reducing and removing things like radon and chemical use in the buildings. What was the last time your school had a chemical cleanup program that you implemented.

I can, I'll never forget I was in Harrisburg with some colleagues and the facility director of the Philadelphia school district, and he got a call on his cell phone and said, I've got the hazmat team showing up right now I've got to leave for a moment and addresses, phone call.

And we came back we said What in the world happened and he said, I had a Mercury contamination so there's still schools that have, you know, things in their science lab that they weren't aware of and so they had mercury beads all around the floor broke and fell, and they had to evacuate and have somebody come in to clean it up.Thinking about how we really use an effective pest management program. Not just hiring a contractor to come out and spray but what do we mean about integrated pest management and then certainly things like lead that we have heard about over the years you know thinking about that as a neurotoxin that has lifelong impacts to learning. So these are just a couple of ideas for you to explore, I'm happy to share offline with you any more resources that you might need and for that I'll stop and turn it over to our next presenter.

So our next presenter has you have already seen and Diana Schroeder for our Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention and she's going to be discussing the healthy eating and physical activity category, Diana.

Thank you, Jane. It's a pleasure to be here.

I've had the fortune of being involved in the process of the school health grants for quite some time.

And it's a real pleasure to be involved again this year, the healthy eating and physical activity what I've chosen to do is to sort of break this down into two parts of the healthy eating part and the physical activity part.

When we talk about healthy behaviors when we talk about preventing disease.

One of the things that all of us, regardless of whether we're children or we're adults, is to focus on improving our eating habits and increasing our physical activity.

Certainly the issue of childhood obesity is not gone away in during this pandemic we're seeing that the numbers are starting to rise again.

And within a school environment we have the prime opportunity to really start to model the appropriate healthy eating behaviors to talk with kids about making good food choices to increase physical activity over the decades we've seen a decrease in the amount of minutes of physical activity that a child gets in a school environment, because there's been an increase in the academic requirements. So now there comes this time where we sort of have to become more creative about how do we enhance the numbers of minutes of physical activity that happened during the school day.

From our perspective when we look at the grant applications that come in under healthy eating and physical activity.

As we started talking about first healthy eating.

We're always looking for projects or proposals that talk about food that increased exposure to new foods to assessing whether or not. Children are engaging and healthy eating habits.

There's a lot of information out there some of it is extraordinarily good some of it is not so great.

We are looking specifically for projects that would be sustainable beyond the one year of funding, what our processes that you can build into your classrooms or you can build into your nutrition programs that are going to continue on.

After the funding for this has actually gone on. I have listed here some suggestions for the healthy eating component things that we have seen be quite successful over the years.

Sometimes I think the hardest part of trying to figure out what you might want to do in a school is to figure out what might work in your school district and I know most of you probably don't have time to dig into the literature and try to figure out, well what will be a good suggestion for my school and so we've given you these programs here that may be places for you to begin to think about how do I enhance healthy eating.

The Edible Schoolyard project is talking about creating food for children to experiment with it is available if you just Google Edible Schoolyard project you're going to see all of their trainings and curriculum materials that would be required for that smarter lunchroom is really talking about how do we enhance the lunchroom environment, how do we enhance the food choices that children make while they are in the school environment smarter lunchroom really focuses on marketing of your lunch programs, as well as improving the food options that are available for kids. One of my favorites and this is the Cooper Institute fitness gram fitness gram is a way to assess student fitness levels.

Prior to, and then after the implementation of a program.

These are concrete measures, my children were just talking who are now obviously all adults were just talking about the President's physical fitness test that they used to do when they were in school as one of the measures that has disappeared as of 2013, the Cooper Institute fitness gram takes that to a whole new level it's the idea of measuring fitness and being able to see individual student performance improvement which is really helpful to the student because it allows for goal setting and goal achieving operation toner calm has been very popular. It is an internet based program that focuses on both daily nutrition and a structured exercise lessons for the classroom.

These are things that can be incorporated easily do not take a whole lot of time, we recognize that there isn't a lot of minutes in an academic day that you cannot allow for an expansion of talking about nutrition and promoting actually exercising the classroom and so this has been very very popular.

So if we can move on, Jane.

Now we're going to talk about the physical activity components. It's the same general idea we're looking at ways to assess fitness and physical activity.

Using curriculums that have already been proven to be effective, that are going to increase our numbers of physical minutes of physical activity and again that are sustainable, some of the programs that we've seen be very effective in schools over the years are what we have listed here.

Spark, which is a physical education curriculum that has support materials training for the physical education teachers as well as the equipment that's necessary, it tends to be sort of low tech, a lot of balls a lot of parachutes movement more than all the other bells and whistles and kids like it, and it has gone very well.

My personal favorite if I had a perfect world it would be catch, which is a coordinated approach to child health.

It is larger and more comprehensive program, but has been around for decades and really does achieve important changes in kids physical activity, peaceful playground, is a place is a type of a program that makes your playground, more structured, your time, better control the outset, peaceful playground started when we were trying to decrease negative behaviors on a playground but has also evolved into promoting better utilization of recess time and take 10 is another favorite of mine because really again low tech and it really allows teachers to build programming into their classroom activities that promotes physical activity and one of the things just as an example that it does is, teach multiplication tables with jumping jacks.

During your math class so it's a lot of that sort of creativity.

Over the years, we have seen some really interesting programs that have been done with ideas of using recess time to engage in step activities, so that the kids are walking around the world or listening to books while they're walking, those sorts of things have been very creative and how we handle increasing physical activity.

There is a list here on this particular slide of equipment that can not be requested, just as a standalone activity elliptical machine stationary bikes street or mountain bikes and you can read through this whole list here.

But the point of it is they need to be tied to a program they need to be tied to a curriculum that says to do this program you need to have this type of equipment.

I will say that as someone who's been.

This type of standalone materials.

And it really, in order for your application to be successful, it has to be tied to be discussing the healthy eating and physical activity category, Diana. Thank you, Jane. It's a pleasure to be here. I've had the fortune of being involved in the process of the school health grants for quite some time.

And it's a real pleasure to be involved again this year, the healthy eating and physical activity what I've chosen to do is to sort of break this down into two parts.

The Healthy Eating part and the physical activity part. When we talk about healthy behaviors when we talk about preventing disease.

One of the things that all of us, regardless of whether we're children or we're adults, is to focus on improving our eating habits and increasing our physical activity.

Certainly the issue of childhood obesity is not gone away in during this pandemic we're seeing that the numbers are starting to rise again.

And within a school environment we have the prime opportunity to really start to model the appropriate healthy eating behaviors to talk with kids about making good food choices to increase physical activity over the decades we've seen a decrease in the amount of minutes of physical activity that a child gets in the school environment, because there's been an increase in the academic requirements. So now there comes this time where we sort of have to become more creative about how do we enhance and the numbers of minutes of physical activity that happened during the school day.

From our perspective when we look at the grant applications that come in under healthy eating and physical activity.

As we start talking about first healthy eating.

We're always looking for projects, or proposals that talk about food that increased exposure to new foods to assessing whether or not. Children are engaging and healthy eating habits.

There's a lot of information out there some of it is extraordinarily good some of it is not so great.

We are looking specifically for projects that would be sustainable beyond the one year of funding, what our processes that you can build into your classrooms or you can build into your nutrition programs that are going to continue on after the funding for this has actually gone on.

I have listed here some suggestions for the healthy eating component things that we have seen be quite successful over the years. Sometimes I think the hardest part of trying to figure out what you might want to do in a school is to figure out what might work in your school district and I know most of you probably don't have time to dig into the literature and try to figure out, well what will be a good suggestion for my school and so we've given you these programs here that may be places for you to begin to think about how do I, enhance healthy eating. The Edible Schoolyard project is talking about creating food for children to experiment with it is available if you just Google Edible Schoolyard project you're going to see all of their trainings and curriculum materials that would be required for that smarter lunchroom is really talking about how do we enhance the lunchroom environment, How do we enhance the food two choices that children make while they are in the school environment smarter lunchroom really focuses on marketing of your lunch programs as well as improving the food options that are available for kids. One of my favorites and this is the Cooper Institute fitness Graham fitness Graham is a way to assess student fitness levels.

Prior to, and then after the implementation of a program.

These are concrete measures, my children were just talking who are now obviously all adults were just talking about the President's physical fitness test that they used to do when they were in school as one of the measures that has disappeared as of 2013, the Cooper Institute fitness Graham takes that to a whole new level it's the idea of measuring fitness and being able to see individual student performance improvement which is really helpful to the student because it allows for goal setting and goal achieving operation toner calm has been very popular. It is an internet based program that focuses on both daily nutrition and a structured exercise lessons for the classroom.

These are things that can be incorporated easily do not take a whole lot of time, we recognize that there isn't a lot of minutes in an academic day that you can allow for an expansion of talking about nutrition and promoting actually exercising the classroom and so this has been very very popular.

So if we can move on Jane.

Now we're going to talk about the physical activity components. It's the same general idea we're looking at ways to assess fitness and physical activity.

Using curriculums that have already been proven to be effective, that are going to increase our numbers of physical minutes of physical activity and again that are sustainable, some of the programs that we've seen be very effective in schools over the years are what we have listed here.

Spark, which is a physical education curriculum that has support materials training for the physical education teachers as well as the equipment that's necessary, it tends to be sort of low tech, a lot of balls a lot of parachutes movement more than all the other bells and whistles and kids like it, and it has gone very well.

My personal favorite if I had a perfect world it would be catch, which is a coordinated approach to child health.

It is larger and more comprehensive program, but has been around for decades and really does achieve important changes in kids physical activity, peaceful playground, is a place is a type of a program that makes your playground, more structured, your time, better control the outset of peaceful playground started when we were trying to decrease negative behaviors on a playground but has also evolved into promoting better utilization of recess time, and take 10 is another favorite of mine because it's really again low tech and it really allows teachers to build in programming into their classroom activities that promotes physical activity and one of the things just as an example that it does is teach multiplication tables with jumping jacks.

During your math class so it's a lot of that sort of creativity.

Over the years, we have seen some really interesting programs that have been done with ideas of using recess time to engage in step activities, so that the kids are walking around the world or listening to books while they're walking, those sorts of things have been very creative and how we handle increasing physical activity.

There is a list here on this particular slide of equipment that can not be requested, just as a standalone activity elliptical machine stationary bikes street or mountain bikes and you can read through this whole list here.

But the point of it is they need to be tied to a program they need to be tied to a curriculum that says to do this program you need to have this type of equipment.

I will say that as someone who's been reviewing us for a number of years.

We see a lot of requests for this type of standalone materials.

And it really, in order for your application to be successful, it has to be tied back to some sort of a curriculum, or a dedicated program that you're developing.

So, thank you, Jane, and I'll let the next person go.

Our final presenter today is Carol Bartow from the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention and she'll be discussing school based health as well as touching a little bit on the supportive services, health grants which I mentioned earlier, just so you know we are about 10 minutes out so if you do have the opportunity to stay online we, we will continue through Cheryl's presentation and then hopefully answer some couple of questions at the end.

Sure.

Hi everyone, my colleagues, I am so happy to spend some time with you today, I am mindful of my place in line and so I'll try to honor everybody's time commitments today.

So, school based health is a really important topic and we get lots of inquiries, every year about it.

Increasingly, I think schools find themselves in positions to address a whole increasingly wide range of health needs of their students. And although we have just a few buildings in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, that actually have complete school based health centers, more often districts find themselves trying to piece together different sections of the Student Health puzzle. And I think that's true now more than ever since we've experienced the pandemic as Leah and the presenters before me before, two whole years.

We see that kind of responsibility in schools, being taxed. But even before the pandemic we know that schools.

Host students every day that have chronic health concerns, things like asthma. Things like diabetes, things like illnesses related to more common flu, and cold and so we understand that there are huge roles to play, mostly taken up in school by school nurses.

And if you look at the research done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics basically there are about, maybe over 84,000 school nurses in our country today, which staff.

The 64% of our schools, but many of those nurses are responsible for covering multiple buildings, many of them work part time. So what it boils down to is that 40% of our schools.

At any given time, have a full time registered nurse there to take care of all these various needs that students and families have.

So, when you talk about charter and private schools, those numbers, decrease even further, rural school buildings have even less school nurse time to meet their needs.

As you schools with a higher percentage of free and reduced lunches serve. So we are having this little tiny crisis I guess with school nurse availability.

We have a national nursing shortage, as I'm sure they would love to speak about. But whenever we see an opportunity and our service area to reach out to our schools and help them meet needs, and to bolster their school nurses.

We certainly want to take it I was thankful for the high Mark foundation and providing this opportunity.

So, it may be helpful to implement more streamlined processes in schools.

Implement systems that save school nurses time and freedom from so much of their administrative work.

We want to take the opportunity to present nurses, a greater role in health education in their schools.

As I mentioned when students come to school with type one or type two diabetes or they have asthma, perhaps some of them have epilepsy. It doesn't really service to the whole entire school population to be educated on those elements, a little more, and school nurses are in a prime position to do that. They're in a prime position to talk about vaccines that's pretty topical these days and vaccine hesitancy and staff members as well. Yet they really don't have a lot of time to accomplish that.

Many times we hear from nurses who would like to have more hands on opportunities for furthering their education around chronic health problems.

Help in bringing their screenings, and interaction with children to a more consistent place. So, getting support for them in busy times is important. So to that end, if you draw your attention to the slide, promising strategies for the school based health grant show that you're building is addressing a need or expanding capacity, especially from a school nurse point of view.

As I mentioned support for mandated screenings, which could include the purchase of secretary or professional nursing services for assistance during screenings.

We many times see in our successful proposals reimbursement for substitute school nurses so we want to encourage that immunization public relations for HPV, and other immunizations again, including coven which is very timely and sort of like rallying around with the administration and a school team to figure out a good public relations strategy for your particular school because we know they're not all the same.

Continuing Education nurses credits.

Many of our nurse applicants attend Pat snap. Some of them have also requested to attend their regional or national continuing education sessions, and some chronic disease care management training, and not just training but actual reimbursed staff time so that they can take a little bit more time with those students that might need extra help in their population so again no different than Leah, when she was talking about successful programs being evidence based and being able to address more than one or two members of the school population will be more successful. And you want to be careful here in the past. Again, I've recruit review these for some time, just like all the partners.

We've seen this category sort of overlap with healthy eating and physical activity. And those are more of a preventive lens school based health can be related to prevention, like we talked about vaccine hesitancy and PR, but we really are trying to seek out needs that are already existing in the population, like, as medics like responding to diabetic children, and increasing nurse time to meet those chronic needs that they see in their building.

So that's really important. And much like Jane mentioned in this category we see a lot of overlap with supportive school health grants and maybe we can move to that slide.

It's easy to see why this happens when we think of children in school. Being healthy and safe, there are some things that they need to accomplish that.

Sometimes, we take for granted that those needs are being met at home. When quite simply, they aren't, and it's been humbling, as a reviewer to see schools, reach out to meet them basic health and hygiene needs of their students and so on the slide you'll see that these supportive service health grants are broken down into two categories.

The first provides $1,000 to assist with the purchase of specific items, and you'll see examples of them and bulleted points.

The second part of this grant is a match, and the match is worth 20 $500 toward actual equipment, if you will, to bolster the school nurse suite, or the Student Health suite and help the school nurse accomplish his or her job more expediently more consistently across the student population things like vision screeners digital skills, new, new cots for the school health suite. Some of these if you're in a district that has more than one building on different campuses you, you may consider sharing.

You know screenings are typically handled during a certain time frame every year. And you can be creative in staggering that just a bit to share some of this equipment because it's pretty expensive, blood pressure monitors glucose meters have been a very popular requested item, and even something as basic as stethoscope so these supportive school health grants do have eligibility criteria, basically three main criteria I'm going to read them so that I make sure that I'm getting them across to you accurately.

More than 60% of students in your district must be eligible for free or reduced lunch, your school district is located in an area where at least 30% of students come from families with incomes below the poverty line.

And of course your district must be located in a Highmark foundation service region, and all of those resources, especially the service region you can look at that right in this PowerPoint slide on the Foundation website.

Again, just, just to reiterate those eligibility requirements go with the supportive service health grants that we call down in the second of my slides.

So, I'm happy to answer any questions and maybe we will take it full circle now back to Jane and see if we have any questions.

During that and again thanks to our partners who have been with us for many, many years.

Chip chip, as we like to call them, Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention the Center for Safe Schools and women for a healthy environment.

Again, thanks. We couldn't do this work without their expertise and guidance through the throughout the process.

Just a quick update here Highmark foundation.org is the website for Highmark foundation. We have the link here which is the direct link to the application, I have the timeline information and of course any questions related to anything that you've heard today or that might pop up in your mind you can reach out to me at James Brooks at Highmark calm, or my telephone number, and we are at four o'clock, but if you are we still have a good number of participants online and Nina, were there any really high end. Top of Mind questions that that came through the question and answering yes, real quick, are we going to be sharing the PowerPoint as well as the recording with people so that they have these websites and things on the slides.

Yes, I'm able to do that. Okay, great. I got that question a lot. And then I'm also seeing a lot of questions regarding mental health needs. And you know what category, those would apply for.

I'm not sure if if one of our panelists wants to take that.

Once again, I think, for the most part, a lot of the questions related related to mental health and behavior would fall under the positive school climate category. We don't have a category that specifically, and addresses mental health issues but in most cases it would fall within the positive school climate and maybe Leah you can expand upon that a little bit.

Absolutely. And yes, I agree there's a significant increase in mental behavioral health needs among among students in the past two years.

So yes, generally speaking, that would would count under the building a positive school climate category. And the majority of the evidence based strategies that I mentioned and that you could explore would address some of those needs.

It's not going to add a school counselor or a behavioral health specialist in your building.

Thank you, Leah.

Jamie have another question What is the deadline for Supportive Services applications. Supportive Services application is open all year. So there's no deadline for that.

So on a calendar basis from January to December, depending on the volume of applications that we receive we will evaluate them on a monthly basis, and then make awards or notifications in the following month, but the application will be open throughout the year.

Tennyson the main themes that I saw and the q amp a to any of our panelists have anything that they saw our want to bring up before we close out.

I did see one question about adding time to assess needs on an already overburdened staff.

Those, some of those items we can, as the technical assistance provider assist you with.

I can't do it for you though. However, I can help you find what might be the best fit for your score your district.

In addition to finding one that that might ease some of those burdens of time to administer. So, those are offline conversations that I'm happy to have with anybody who wants to submit an application to help guide you to what might be the right fit for you.

And Jane. I'm more than happy to put my email contact for people who might want to have specific questions about healthy eating and physical activity and I would imagine most of the other technical partners would be willing to do the same thing.

Yeah, absolutely. Jane we've worked with nearly 300 schools and in child care centers to date and so, no it's finding that right project within that we can bring a lot of folks to the table to get some energy and excitement around and buy it, you know there was discussion about facility directors and, and it's hard, oftentimes the building level, but, you know, we've worked with dozens and dozens and dozens of facility directors it's a matter of finding that particular project initiative that they can be a part of. And then that really does you know getting that first project on the ground, really spurs then lots of energy and excitement to do things in the coming years and so you know that's what we've seen is that it's an opportunity to do one thing and try it together collectively as a whole, but then that has brought lots of improvement across other buildings seniors to follow.

And this is why we value our technical partners, so much because they are there for us throughout the year and are willing to jump in and help us with any kind of questions or comments that that our schools need so thank you again to our technical partners thank you to everyone that logged in, today for the webinar, the information will be shared externally. Once we compile all of the questions and the answers and the comments and that'll be shared to everybody that registered for today so again thank you very much for participating. And we look forward to a new and exciting grant cycle. Have a great day. Thank you.