A Healthy School promotes the physical, mental, social and spiritual health of the whole school community. It looks beyond the classroom to the entire school setting and involves students, staff, parents, volunteers and community partners. Together, they share ideas, plan and take action to help kids lead healthy, active lives.

A Healthy School: 

• Empowers students to be more involved in school life and part of the positive change
• Improves student success and well-being
• Reduces absenteeism
• Improves academic achievement
• Promotes diversity and inclusion
• Improves student interaction and promotes a sense of belonging within their school

Public health plays a major role in supporting Healthy Schools and can help elementary and secondary schools: 

• Promote the Healthy Schools framework as a best practice model
• Create a Healthy Schools team
• Plan and implement health promotion campaigns that target school-wide involvement

Video: What does the Healthy Schools Approach really mean?

Getting started

Follow these steps to adopt the Healthy Schools framework and make your school an even healthier place to live, learn and work.

1. Form a Healthy School group
2. Identify strengths and areas for improvement
3. Develop an action plan
4. Implement the action plan
5. Evaluate and celebrate achievements
6. Review and adjust the plan

The GBHU Healthy School Toolkit is designed to guide schools through the steps to creating a healthier school. School Health Committees may choose to use all or any of the resources in the Toolkit to support their Healthy Schools work. Contact your school’s public health nurse to help you get started!

OPHEA Healthy School Certification

Apply for the OPHEA Healthy School certification.

https://ophea.net/healthy-schools-certification   

The Youth Wellness Champions Program (YWC), funded by the Government of Ontario and coordinated by the Registered Nurse’s Association of Ontario, is an innovative, peer-based program based on youth engagement principles, designed to help youth develop the knowledge and skills they need to cope with mental health and substance use issues.

Peer-to-peer programs like YWC are powerful tools that help shifts attitudes from a mental illness focus to a mental health promotion lens. Why? Peer leaders are easier to relate to than adults – they can more easily contextualize messages and expectations for a youth audience. They share important knowledge that can help both youth and adult allies with recognition, support, prevention, early intervention efforts, and (where appropriate) resilience.

The goals of the YWC program are:

1. Promoting mental health strategies and increasing mental health literacy.
2. Reducing stigma around mental illness.
3. Preventing substance use.
4. Creating supportive, inclusive and resilient environments.

The Youth Wellness Champions Toolkit supports educators, adult allies and youth in implementing a youth-led mental health initiative in school and community settings. 

Grey Bruce Public Health and the Registered Nurse’s Association have been partnering with Bruce Grey Catholic District School Board and Bluewater District School Board to deliver YWC in many local schools since 2014.   For more information and to learn how to bring YWC to your school, contact your school’s Public Health Nurse.

Roots of Empathy is an international evidence-based classroom program for grades kindergarten to grade eight designed to raise levels of empathy, resulting in more respectful and caring relationships and reduced levels of bullying and aggression. Part of the success is the universal nature of the program- all students are positively engaged instead of targeting bullies or aggressive children. At the heart of the program are a neighbourhood infant and parent who visit the classroom nine times over the school year. A trained Roots of Empathy Instructor coaches students to observe the baby’s development and to label the baby’s feelings. In this experiential learning, the baby is the “Teacher” and a lever, which the instructor uses to help children identify and reflect on their own feelings and the feelings of others. This “emotional literacy” taught in the program lays the foundation for safer and more caring classrooms, where children are the “Changers”.

Extensive evaluation of the program has shown that Roots of Empathy children demonstrated:

• Increases in social and emotional knowledge
• Decreases in aggression
• Increases in prosocial behaviour (e.g. sharing, helping and including)
• Increased perceptions of their classroom as a caring environment
• Increased understanding of infants and parenting
• Lasting results with improvements in behaviours were maintained three years later.

Grey Bruce Public Health partners with Roots of Empathy, local school boards and our communities to bring this program to classrooms in our region. For more information and to learn how to bring Roots of Empathy to your school, how to become a trained Instructor, or how your baby can become a “teacher” in the program, contact schools@publichealthgreybruce.on.ca or visit www.rootsofempathy.org