School health team experiences: Factors contributing to success and challenges

Currently guidelines exist for starting a School Health Team (SHT) and for improving school health through programs and policies initiated by School Health Teams (SHTs). However, limited information exists on factors influencing the SHT success or factors that provide challenges to SHTs. The School Health Improvement Partnership (SHIP) program works with 43 public schools in one South Carolina County to implement and evaluate SHTs over a four year period. SHTs are trained, provided funds and technical assistance. This presentation will describe school demographics (size, race, SES) and SHT functionality (size, diversity, number of meetings, meeting attendance, and accomplishments). Result from focus groups conducted with randomly selected schools highlighting self-reported accomplishments and lessons learned will be detailed. SHT accomplishments such as: building walking trails, improving play ground equipment, strengthening safety protocols and security systems, decreasing unhealthy vending snack options, and increasing physical activity time will be highlighted. SHTs reported supportive school and district administration, community linkages, being part of county-wide effort through SHIP, motivation, identifying manageable projects and having early success as contributing to their success. SHTs also reported lack of school administration support, competing commitments for school staff, lack of time, and limited resources as factors that were challenging. Lastly, based on study findings, recommendations for sustaining school health team functioning will be shared.