Wellness Policy and Wellness Centers

A blogger on the LeftinSF site, while describing the agenda of an upcoming San Francisco Board of Education meeting, listed the following item on the consent calendar:

Award $10,000 from the San Francisco Foundation for the Wellness Policy implementation at five elementary schools, five middle schools and five high schools. The grant also requires the District to identify and implement a Wellness Policy implementer at each middle school and high school. Currently, four high schools do not have a Wellness Center — Washington High School, Newcomer High School, June Jordan School for Equity and Wallenberg High School.

It made me realize that there might be some confusion between the school district’s Wellness Policy, and the Wellness Centers located in some schools. Except for the use of the word "Wellness" in both names, there is no connection between the Wellness Policy (formerly the Nutrition Policy) and the Wellness Centers. The Wellness Policy is a required part of the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act of 2004 which required school districts to develop a policy addressing nutrition and a few related issues, like health education, by the start of this school year. Thanks to a Board of Education resolution by BOE Commissioners Dan Kelly and Jill Wynns, the San Francisco Unified School District has had in place since 2003 one of the most stringent and comprehensive nutrition policies in the nation; creating the Wellness Policy required only adding in descriptions of what was already being done to meet the other requirements of a Wellness Policy (in other words, the district was already doing everything required by the federal govt. for a Wellness Policy, and more, but now it is all officially written down in one place.)

One of the requirements of the federally mandated Wellness Policy is that there be people charged with implementing the policy. The mini grant which the School Health Programs Department applied for and got, is to fund a stipend for a teacher at each of 15 schools (5 elementary, 5 middle, and 5 high) to receive training in the district's Wellness Policy and then go back to their own school and help educate the school community about the policy, and make sure it is being implemented (for example, it would be great if a teacher from Martin Luther King Middle School were to make sure that the Flaming Hot Cheetos were removed from their vending machines......)

The Wellness Centers, or Teen Health Clinics, on the other hand, are funded and run by the Department of Public Health. These fabulous community resources are open to the entire community, but especially serve the teens in the schools in which they are located, and schools nearby. Balboa High School has one of the oldest Teen Clinics, having celebrated its 20th anniversary last spring, and it serves Bal students as well as students from nearby Leadership High School and James Denman Middle School. For reasons baffling to me, when Frank Tom (at the time, Assistant Superintendent for High Schools) proposed moving Leadership onto the Balboa campus, he insisted on counting the Teen Clinic space at Balboa as "empty classrooms", despite the fact that the clinic has a long term lease for the space and it is in use daily. Relocating Leadership to the Balboa campus would have necessitated the closure of the Teen Clinic, and the loss of this valuable resource for all students, who use the services of the clinic thousands of times during a school year, for everything from flu shots and sports physicals to mental health counseling and help quitting smoking.

I agree that every high school needs a Wellness Center (every middle school too!) However, to be clear, the mini grant of $10,000 is in no way connected to the Wellness Centers; it is to train teachers to help implement the Wellness Policy (aka nutrition policy) in their schools.