SCHOOL-BASED HEALTH-EDUCATION - WHAT WORKS

Increasingly, health care reform efforts are focusing on interdiscipli nary, comprehensive approaches to health care delivery. I argue that s chool health education is a vital part of improving the health of this nation's citizens and that effective school-based education must be c omprehensive, continuous, and interdisciplinary and must offer informa tion, motivation, and skills. The National Center for Health Education , the nation's leading private organization focusing solely on compreh ensive health education, has developed Growing Healthy, a comprehensiv e school-based curriculum aimed at promoting healthy lifestyle choices for children in grades kindergarten through six, now in over 9,000 el ementary schools in 42 states. Students participating in the Growing H ealthy program showed greater benefits in their health knowledge, atti tudes, and behaviors than participants in three targeted, one-shot (he alth education) programs. Further studies have shown that school-based health education programs that start early and continue through sever al grades provide significant and sustained effects on overall health knowledge, attitudes, and practices.