By Tom Latek
Kentucky Today
The Kentucky Department of Education’s (KDE’s) School Health Branch is making strides to help schools in the areas of nutrition, health services, and physical activity, which includes encouraging healthy lifestyles beyond the classroom.
Created in June 2023, part of the branch’s funding comes from a five-year cooperative agreement with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The branch’s main duties are to develop and share school health tools, deliver professional learning and technical assistance to educators, school nurses and administrators, collect school health data to further inform Kentucky education policy and practice, and increase people’s knowledge of the connections between student academic and health outcomes.
Branch Manager Jim Tackett said the branch promotes student and staff well-being through the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) lens.
WSCC is a collaborative framework between the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) and the CDC for integrating education and health to support children’s cognitive, physical, social and emotional development. It focuses on collaboration between schools, communities and health sectors to align resources, programs and policies that benefit the whole child.
In addition to Tackett, the branch has a state nurse consultant, resource management analyst, three program health administrators for Eastern, Central and Western Kentucky, a Healthy Schools project director and a school health consultant.
Tackett explained the WSCC paved the way for Kentucky to receive more CDC funding, impacting more schools, districts and local communities.
“When COVID hit, one of the things I think that really positioned Kentucky well, if we could have been positioned well, was that we already had that subcommittee formed,” he said. “We were not trying to create relationships with partners that we had never worked with before, so that really helped us be able to get to work on the issue at hand. We knew each other’s strengths and expertise.”
During the outbreak, the need for physical and mental health support grew in schools across the country. Tackett said the pandemic exacerbated some student health issues that had not been receiving enough attention.
“Some of those issues had been swept under the rug a little bit over the years, but it really came to a head when the pandemic hit and we saw all of these issues rise up as things that we had to address,” Tackett noted.
Anyone who has questions or needs assistance can email Tackett at Jim.Tackett@education.ky.gov.