Evaluation of the Schools for Healthy Lifestyles Program

The Schools for Healthy Lifestyles program was initiated ten years ago in an attempt to help reverse the state's poor health status. The program teaches the importance of living a healthy lifestyle to students, their families and school faculty. Four areas are emphasized in the curriculum: promoting physical activity and fitness; nutrition; tobacco use prevention; and injury prevention.

While evaluation and statistical analysis of the program has been positive in recent years using a Priority Health Concerns (PHC) survey and using the Cooper Fitnessgram, a limitation of the evaluation was lack of comparison schools. To address these limitations, a more rigorous methodology was used by evaluating program impact using a three group comparison design.

Results of the Fitnessgram testing suggest that children who participated in the SHL programs would be considered at a higher level of fitness on several measures of aerobic capacity and strength at post-test levels when compared to pre-test levels using the Fitnessgram standards. In addition, levels of fitness for SHL schools were significantly higher at post-testing compared to control schools not receiving SHL programming.

The results suggest that the SHL programs have a statistically positive impact on knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of health for children from pre-testing to post-testing based on a number of results from the PHC questionnaire. Furthermore, students in SHL schools that received the addition of manualized curriculum and lifestyle coaches performed better on post-test survey questions than students receiving standard SHL programming or schools serving as controls.