By Joey Kaji, SBHA Youth Advisory Council member
The following reflects Nikhil’s lived experiences, thoughts, and opinions.
Growing up, there is always an emphasis on maintaining our own health. In elementary school, it starts with our parents making sure we eat our fruits and vegetables. In middle school, it continued forward to sex education. Finally, in high school and college, we are constantly reminded of how our health-related choices have an impact on our lives. To ensure that we are making healthy decisions throughout our lives, it is imperative that every child gets educated on all aspects of health. General healthcare education is defined as one of the three key tenets of preventative health care (1).1 To approach a healthy society, it is crucial to encourage general health education. Encouraging education means teaching youth more about a wide range of topics, from financing healthcare to improving nutrition. Throughout high school, I worked to improve sex education curriculums to provide more thorough knowledge. Working with individual curriculums, I noticed the variation in the quality of health education.
The CDC states that the health education curriculum should include (2):
- A set of intended learning outcomes or objectives that directly relate to students’ acquisition of health-related knowledge, attitudes, and skills.
- A planned progression of developmentally appropriate lessons or learning experiences that lead to achieving health objectives.
- Continuity between lessons or learning experiences that clearly reinforce the adoption and maintenance of specific health-enhancing behaviors.
- Content or materials that correspond with the sequence of learning events and help teachers and students meet the learning objectives.
- Assessment strategies to determine if students have achieved the desired learning.
Although broad, these guidelines provide scenarios in which both students and teachers can work together. An issue that arises, however, is that not all school districts follow the same health education within a state, much less in the country.
One possible solution to helping to form better health education curriculums is creating better standards for educators. In only 25 states, the law requires that the healthcare curriculum follow the health education standard. This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that certain topics like nutrition and mental health are often not addressed at all in the curriculum (3). Although it is difficult to change the legislation in state governments, school-based health centers (SBHCs) could provide different supplemental classes regarding the content that the health classes are missing. These topics range from nutrition to healthy relationships. The School-Based Health Alliance E-Library provides many presentations/classwork models that could help give this information to students. Utilizing the vast amount of health resources that SBHCs have at their fingertips could help provide youth with health information critical for their preventative health.
Another issue that is prevalent facing public health education is the lack of reform (4). Any efforts to make changes to curriculums to help address the lack of youth health education are often met with the challenging political landscape. Many health educators turned to asking parents for support or for children to do their own research, leading to varying comprehension of health. SBHCs represent a safe environment for one-on-one questions that can be answered. One possible avenue to execute this is for the youth to write up their questions before a meeting with a provider. Utilizing the consolidated health information in SBHCs allows students to get their questions privately answered. This provides a great opportunity for students to learn what can’t be reformed and may offer a chance to help reduce the lack of health comprehension.
The lack of health information for youth can lead to uneducated choices with long-term consequences. Helping youth gain more access to information may be a great solution to solving many other crises, from the drug epidemic to mental health struggles.
Bibliography:
- “Preventive Healthcare.” Patient Advocate Foundation, 1 Mar. 2018, www.patientadvocate.org/explore-our-resources/interacting-with-your-insurer/preventive-healthcare/.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Health Education in Schools.” Www.cdc.gov, 21 Apr. 2021, www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/health-education/index.htm.
- Using State Policy to Create Healthy Schools State Statutes and Regulations for Healthy Schools School. 2017. https://cms.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/WSCC-State-Policy-Health-Education.pdf
- Mann, Michael J, and David K Lohrmann. “Addressing Challenges to the Reliable, Large-Scale Implementation of Effective School Health Education.” Health promotion practice vol. 20,6 (2019): 834-844. doi:10.1177/1524839919870196