Schools have emerged as important places to address childhood health problems, such as asthma and obesity. Children spend most of their waking hours at school, where they consume up to one-half of their daily calories. Schools also play an important role in the life of a neighborhood, serving as local hubs where students, teachers, parents, and community members can come together.

The schools that low-income children of color attend often maintain less healthy settings for learning, with poorer air quality, less access to physical activity, higher exposure to environmental toxins, fewer health services, inadequate facilities, and less access to healthy foods and safe drinking water during the school day. The low-income communities in which these schools are situated are less likely to have parks, playgrounds, or green spaces for outdoor play. More than half of public schools do not have a full-time school nurse or counselor on staff, and less than 5 percent of the nation’s students have access to services through a school-based health center. Compounding matters, nearly 20 percent of students enter school with a chronic health condition, such as asthma, life-threatening allergies, diabetes, or seizure disorder. Many of these diseases have a disproportionate impact on low-income African-American and Latino students. For example, 40 percent of African-American children and 39 percent of Latino children are overweight or obese compared with 26 percent of white children.

Since 2002, Healthy Schools Campaign (HSC) has worked at the intersection of health and education, starting as a local organization in Chicago and then expanding nationally. In its early years, the organization focused on addressing obesity and asthma by applying traditional components of the Healthy Eating Active Living (HEAL) model to the school setting. HSC advocated for healthier school meals, strong physical education policies, recess, physical activity, and other health-related issues. But in keeping with the national dialogue on student health and school wellness, HSC’s approach now includes efforts to grapple with chronic absenteeism and also build systems to fund school-based health services in order to address the full range of children’s physical, mental, and behavioral health issues.

Read the full article about connecting health and education by Rochelle Davis and Sarah Weisz at Stanford Social Innovation Review.