What Can HSC's $25,000 Challenge Mean for Children's Health and Our Environment?
HSC is excited to announce a $25,000 challenge grant from an anonymous donor! To meet the challenge, we must raise $25,000 in gifts from new donors, or gifts in higher amounts from previous donors. This is an amazing opportunity to leverage $50,000 in crucial support for our work.
Now, we need your help. Please consider making a first-time gift to support HSC, increasing your annual gift, or telling your friends and colleagues about this opportunity to help bring much-needed resources to the campaign for wellness and environmental health in schools.
You can make a gift and find tools to tell your friends here.
Your gift will help us continue the important work of making schools healthier places in which to learn and work. Our goal is for schools to provide healthy environments that have a positive impact on the rates of childhood obesity and asthma. To create sustainable, long-term change, we help parents, school nurses, teachers, principals, students and other school stakeholders work hands-on to improve their schools, and make sure that they have a voice in advocating for effective, long-term change. HSC's work makes an impact on the national policies that shape wellness and environmental health at schools.
HSC’s efforts mean:
- Children in schools across the country eating more fresh, healthy food
- School staff cleaning classrooms with safe, effective, environmentally friendly cleaners
- Parents joining together to establish active school wellness teams
- Kids running and playing at recess
- School nurses leading change to make sure their schools support student wellness
- Students with asthma breathing easily in well-ventilated green schools after years of using an inhaler to get through the day at a school with poor indoor air quality
- High school students working together to create healthy school lunches that meet high nutrition standards on a tight budget – then telling their friends about the benefits of healthy eating as the meals they design are served in schools across the nation
Because HSC works with school stakeholders – teachers, parents, nurses, students, principals, facilities’ staff, architects, community leaders and more – to make change, our impact reaches beyond one-time events to help create a culture of wellness and sustainability in our nation’s schools.
Please consider lending your support to this campaign for our environment, our children and education.
Click here to make a gift or tell your friends about this opportunity to make a difference.
Breakfast in the Classroom Gaining Momentum
|
| Chicago students picking up breakfast |
Parents, advocates and school leaders nationwide are speaking up in support of school breakfast -- especially universal, in-classroom breakfast programs that are proving highly effective in ensuring that children have access to breakfast before they begin their studies for the day. An annual report on the state of school breakfast, released this month by the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), calls universal breakfast in the classroom a "key strategy that urban school districts across the nation should adopt to expand breakfast participation among low-income students."
With this strategy, breakfast is served to all students in a school at no charge, in the classroom during the first few minutes of the day before lessons begin. Such programs increase participation dramatically, take away stigma and help children learn that breakfast is part of a normal routine. They provide vital nutrition to children who may otherwise not be able to eat breakfast, and have been linked to increased academic achievement.
"We support this breakfast initiative because it’s good for kids any way you look at it," said HSC’s Chicago Director Guillermo Gomez. "It’s not only good for their health but also helps kids do well in school. Breakfast is such a simple way to improve behavior, increase attendance and give kids the fuel they need to focus and learn."
More than 50 parents leaders from Chicago’s Latino and African-American communities came together on Dec. 10 at an HSC-organized Parents United for Healthy Schools/Padres Unidos para Escuelas Saludables (PUHS) meeting to develop plans for supporting the breakfast in the classroom program that Chicago Public Schools has launched. The program is now in place in more than 170 of the district's schools. The parent and community leaders or PUHS, who have led the development of wellness teams at more than 40 schools across the city, can play a key role in encouraging their school to bring a universal, in-classroom breakfast program to students.
Each school’s principal is responsible for making the decision to bring a breakfast in the classroom program to the school. Gomez points out that parents can play a key role in that decision by discussing the benefits of breakfast with the principal and taking steps -- such as forming a school wellness team -- to foster a culture that supports wellness.
To learn more about the state of school breakfast nationwide, check out the recent FRAC report. To learn more about Parents United for Healthy Schools, contact HSC’s Guillermo Gomez. |
