Since last fall, a Coordinated School Health team has been working with community partners at Growing Hope to rewrite the Ypsilanti Community Schools’ Wellness Policy. After almost a year in development, the policy is expected to be approved next month.
“We want to implement community wide strategies to make healthy choice the easy choice. We want people to be healthy by default,” said Karen Spangler, project coordinator on the policy. She has been working on the policy with the Coordinated School Health team through a Healthy By Default grant from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Spangler said the program, funded by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health Project, targets communities that have a high proportion of that have health disparities in African American populations. Of 14 organizations selected to receive the grant, Growing Hope was one of them.
“We want to create a program that works on behavioral changes in the 15 to 30 age group,” she said, and that starts within the schools.
The revised YCS Wellness Policy will focus on nutrition education, physical education and mental health to create a healthy environment within the district over all.
[For more of this story, written by Krystal Elliot, go to http://www.heritage.com/articl...txt?viewmode=default]
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