Making effective, meaningful policies involves four keys steps. Wellness Solutions for Massachusetts gives you access to tools to use at each step in the process:

1. Get Started
2. Assess Your School
3. Develop an Action Plan
4. Evaluate Your Outcomes

Why Wellness?
Despite a wealth of nutrition and health information, many health experts see an epidemic of obesity, sedentary lifestyles and undernourished children as critical health and economic issues in the Commonwealth and the United States.

To address these issues the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004 requires that each school district participating in the national school lunch program develop a local wellness policy for the 2006-2007 school year.

• The goal of these policies is for schools to promote healthy eating and physical activity.
• Each district will choose its own objectives to help achieve this goal. For example, one school might choose to implement a salad bar and offer more intramural sports, while another school may offer fresh produce from a local farmer and increase the amount of physical education.

This is an exciting time and an opportunity for parents, teachers, coaches, school administrators, and students alike to effect change in their schools and improve the health and wellness of students and their communities.

Get Started
In response to the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004, all schools participating on the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs must have a wellness plan in pace at the start of the 2006-2007 school year. The Massachusetts Department of Education Child Nutrition and Coordinated School Health programs asked School Foodservice Directors and Health Coordinators to get involved and take a leadership role. If your school hasn't already done so - it's time to:

1. Assemble your team. Your wellness policy team may include students, parents, teachers, school administrators, coaches, counselors, school foodservice personnel and community members who are concerned with the wellness of students as well as adults.
2. Get acquainted with policy requirements. Understand current legislation as well as the state, local and national facts and figures that justify the need for improving health behaviors and wellness in your school.
3. Check out resources like facts sheets, presentations, and other materials to help support your wellness policy.
4. Get inspired! See what schools across the country have done to promote wellness.

Assess Your School
One of the first tasks of the wellness team is to complete a needs assessment:

1. Identify the strengths and weaknesses in your school programs and policies.
2. Involve students in surveying student opinions about nutrition, health and physical education programs and services in your school.
   
   There is an exciting new assessment tool available! Designed specifically for students, the "Students Taking Charge" toolkit will empower students to seek the opinions of fellow classmates and to use these opinions to influence policies and programs within their schools. Students will share their feelings about a variety of issues, including health, physical education, school food, vending machines and food preferences.
   
   Students can be a valuable asset to your Wellness Policy committee, and their voices should be heard! Include student representatives on your policy team. Then find out what THEY think, by sharing this toolkit with them and encouraging them to be active participants in the policy process.

Develop an Action Plan
Once you have assembled your team and assessed your school health environment, use the information you have discovered to shape your plan of action:

• Identify desired outcomes and draft policy goals. Make sure goals are realistic, attainable and address nutrition education, physical activity and other school-based activities that will improve the school health environment. Take advantage of these time-saving tools as you draft your goals and objectives.
• Create a timeline of short-term and long-term policy goals to achieve desired outcomes.
• Define criteria or key components for evaluating success of policy goals and objectives. Questions you might ask yourself:
  • Has enrollment in programs increased?
  • How do stakeholders (students, parents, teachers, administrators) feel about policy changes?
  • Are changes cost effective?
• Consider sample policies and templates that demonstrate strategies for success from districts across the state and the country.

Evaluate Your Outcomes
Using the evaluation criteria or key components defined in the development phase, determine if your policy made the grade. Then ask yourself:

• Are there additional changes required?
• Are there new issues that need to be addressed?
  
  
  The sky's the limit!
  Be Well - Get Involved - Get Started - with Policy Basics