Farrell Area School District

Reaching out to the Community to Improve Student Health

May, 2005

Farrell Area School District Superintendent Richard R. Rubano Junior took one look at the 43 people assembled in a meeting room for the district’s first obesity prevention meeting – a mix of representatives from the community, local businesses, health officials and school district – and knew the time had come to make student health a priority.

“He asked me how I was able to get all of them together,” said Lynne Powell, Community Outreach Specialist for the District.

Clearly, this was an issue that resonated loudly. “He knew there was a link between healthy students and improved academic performance,” said Lynne, who credits Rubano’s support for the district’s new focus. “Everything starts at the top, and we’ve been fortunate enough to have us behind him.”

Farrell began with that initial meeting in early 2004, setting out to define goals and strategies to address childhood obesity and improve student health. A year and a half later, the group has merged into a School Health Council that meets monthly, and includes student representatives. The district is a model of incorporating the message that healthy eating and physical activity are essential skills to learn and teach, and those messages are everywhere – from the school’s walls to its newspaper to its curriculum.

Farrell is lucky enough to have someone like Lynne whose job responsibilities including writing grants and bringing funding and services from the community into the school district. It’s not a staff position most districts employ. But Farrell has a number of challenges, as well. Located 60 miles north of Pittsburgh on the Ohio border in Mercer County, Farrell is a rural district with 80 percent of students on free or reduced lunch.

“I kept picking up the paper and saw that people in our community were dying at 53, 54 – of hypertension, diabetes and other obesity-related diseases,” said Lynne. “We also noticed that juvenile diabetes was on the rise, and we decided that it was time to do something about it.

“As a group our council decided that the best legacy we could leave a child was to teach them how to be healthy. We wanted to give them the tools to empower themselves so that they could take the information with them when they graduate and grow into healthy citizens.”

Farrell, whose 1,066 students, grades K-12, are taught in one building connected by a central office and cafeteria, worked with the American Cancer Society to develop a coordinated school health framework. It brought together staff from the health, PE, food service, school health, family and consumer science and other departments to address health and wellness issues.

Because Lynne was accustomed to coordinating community and business groups with school activities, she was able to get involvement from local supermarkets, and worked with Penn State Cooperative Extension to provide nutrition education.

“Our two primary goals were to reduce obesity and increase nutrition education awareness,” she said. The district began by removing sodas and sugary snacks from vending machines, and making healthier substitutions in the school’s snack shop – trading ice cream for frozen yogurt, regular fried potato chips for baked chips and bags of nuts. It also reduced the price of a second carton of milk to 18 cents, to encourage students to drink more milk.

Aramark, the district’s food service provider, offers a free salad bar to grades 6 through 12. “They have really stepped up to the plate in helping us offer healthier choices and make them affordable,” said Lynne. Farrell was also one of the first schools in the state to offer the Grab-and-Go Breakfast Program, offered through Penn State University.

The district also lined its cafeteria walls and hallways with nutritional information and banners about the importance of healthy eating. And the PANA Keystone Healthy Zone Schools banner greets students as they enter the front doors of the building.

Farrell also began to offer nutrition education in its after-school program that targets students who need additional academic help. Penn State Cooperative Extension provided a nutritionist and nutrition educator to work with students and to train six teachers who would then take nutrition information back to the classroom. The district used the USDA Power of Choice program and Penn State’s Nutrition Mission CD-Rom educational program as part of the curriculum.

“We’re now working on peer teaching – getting the older students to teach the younger ones some nutrition lessons,” said Lynne. “We’re going to have them do a video, and then we hope they’ll take that to their scouting programs, their churches, etc.”

The district also made a conscious effort to imbed healthy eating messages into the science and math curriculums, using calories as units of measures and teaching students about the science of nutrition. It also used outside grant money to offer healthy fruit and vegetable snack breaks to students.

Farrell also began offering students in its after-school program the opportunity to use the district’s weight room or to walk on its treadmills or outside on the track. “We wanted to show them that exercising could be fun, and that they had the power of choice,” said Lynne. The district had found that students who needed additional academic help were also often the least active, and hoped that getting those students up and moving would translate into improved academic performance.

The district has, for years, had a fairly advanced physical education program. PE Supervisor Louis Paris has been compiling student PE Report Cards for the last seven years, charting students heights, weights, flexibility and other measures of fitness. Paris focuses on individual achievement and success, telling students that each of them has a unique performance level.

Some of Paris’s stats are extremely encouraging. From January 20 to May 6, 94 male students in grades 7 – 12 used the district’s circuit weight training equipment during their PE rotation, and lost a total of 529 pounds, or 5.8 pounds per student. Each boy lost 3.2 percent body fat, and each boy’s resting heart rate dropped 11 points. At the same time each boy’s flexibility increased by 3 inches. The district is calculating the same data for girls who were in the rotation.

Farrell is working to find ways to increase the amount of time it allocates for PE, but in the meantime engages students in mileage clubs that reward them for the amount of steps they walk and encourages staff to participate in district-wide fitness events.

Farrell also works with Slippery Rock University, which sends PE student teachers to work with Louis. “They volunteered to staff the fitness center three days a week from 3 – 5 p.m. so the school staff could use it,” said Lynne.

The biggest challenge for Farrell in all its efforts to focus on healthy eating and physical activity has been parents, according to Lynne. “Many of them are fantastic, and I don’t want to alienate them. They are our biggest supporters because they have such a direct influence over kids. But we need more help because many of them are still feeding their kids fast food.”

The kids themselves seem to be making changes, however. “We’ve had two panel discussions that were totally unrehearsed, and the students told us they like having healthier choices,” she says. “We expected them to tell us they miss the soda, but they didn’t. And we’re selling more fruit in the lunch lines, so it seems to be working.

“We still have gaps – we’d like to have more health teachers, more text books, more psychological counseling services,” she says. “We still have miles to go, but we’re taking steps.

“We are truly a community school district,” says Lynne. “We try to incorporate the community into everything we do, and we know that healthier students will make better citizens and community members and a stronger work force.”