LESSON 5:
Parent and stakeholder engagement can be a powerful catalyst for making school-based change.

Parent and stakeholder engagement can be a powerful catalyst for making school-based change.

Parents’ rally for healthy schools, May 2006

At Healthy Schools Campaign, we believe that all families, faculty, staff, students and community members must have a voice in decisions that affect the school environment, and that meaningful and sustainable change occurs when informed, engaged and empowered stakeholders work in collaboration with school officials and policymakers.

For this reason, we have worked to bring together the voices of stakeholders throughout our schools and communities: parents, principals, school nurses, students, facility managers, community members and others. Together, these individual groups have raised a collective voice for health and wellness in schools.

Parents and school leaders fighting health disparities. In 2004, for example, HSC and several of our partners launched the Partnership to Reduce Disparities in Asthma and Obesity in Latino Schools, an intensive four-year campaign to empower parents in Chicago’s Latino communities to bring about changes in school food and fitness to combat the staggering rates of childhood asthma and obesity that the communities’ children face. This project was funded by an environmental justice grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).

Mitchell School, May 2007

Four years later, more than 900 parents were involved and parent leaders were helping 46 schools serving 35,000 students establish wellness teams to lead change at school. Today, this work continues under the Parents United for Healthy Schools/Padres Unidos para Escuelas Saludables program.

Through this project, parents worked alongside community leaders, principals and advocates to help make schools healthy places for their children. Because the project focused on engaging parents and the community in healthy lifestyles as a method for making the district’s schools healthier places for children, the positive consequences expanded to more than the city’s classrooms. Working toward this goal created change that reached beyond the schoolyard to shape neighborhood life in a way that promotes healthy lifestyles for children, families and communities: parents have formed walking groups and cooking classes, children walk to school with their families, and neighborhood restaurants are even beginning to offer healthier options.

The value in consistent messaging at home and at school is tremendous, and parents have become schools’ biggest supporters in cutting out unhealthy food options and increasing physical activity. As one parent explained: “It’s very important to continue the good habits at home and school. It defeats the purpose to have good habits at home but not have healthy food available at school.”

Policy implications to support stakeholder engagement

Create structure and provide support for stakeholder efforts to improve school health. Leading scientists at government agencies including the CDC, EPA and USDA have established evidence-based recommendations for how schools can support student health and learning. But most schools, for a variety of reasons, are not putting those recommendations in place. Healthy Schools Campaign has found that parents, principals and other school stakeholders, when informed and engaged, can be very successful in helping schools implement strategies that promote student health.

Supporting stakeholder efforts to bring school practices into alignment with CDC, EPA and USDA recommendations is an appropriate role for the federal government, and HSC asks that:

National leaders put the organizational mechanisms and resources in place to empower parents and other school stakeholders in their work to make schools healthy places that support wellness and learning.

The government funds community-based participatory research that develops best practices for engaging and empower school stakeholders.

An interagency taskforce ensures that all programs for schools are delivered in an effective and coordinated fashion.