Allan Appel Photo
Some of the Fair Haven team: Mary Rosario, Vicky Torres, Cordero, and Dania Torres.
A 13-year-old was uncharacteristically absent from school several days in a row at Fair Haven School. The drop-out prevention specialist called and found the girl had broken her leg. The school bus didn’t stop close enough to her house for her to hobble to it, and the dad didn’t know how to obtain a wheelchair. The school rearranged transportation schedules so a bus stopped directly in front of the girl’s house, and helped the family get a wheelchair.
As a result of this and other interventions, the school’s chronic absenteeism rate has dropped from 27 percent two years ago to 18 percent last year, and looks to fall even further this year.
Recent stats from the school based health clinics.
Those were the kinds of stories that more than 350 New Haven Public School teachers, administrators, nurses, intervention specialists, parents, and kids came to celebrate at a festive gathering at Anthony’s Ocean View on Lighthouse Road in Morris Cove Wednesday evening.
The occasion was the school system’s third annual Health & Wellness Summit. The gathering brought together the district health and wellness committees among school-based health clinics, the relatively new dental clinics, the nutrition programs that are increasingly providing more healthful foods for kids’ meals, the schools’ family resource centers, and the array of community partners that coordinate psychological and other services with the schools’ teams.
All together, they comprise a grassroots network of caregivers in the school and community that aims to serve, as the event’s tag line put it, “the whole child, the whole school, the whole community.”
Among the many awards of recognition given out, Fair Haven School was cited for its efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism, defined as ten unexcused absences per student.
Peters and Clark celebrate 15 years of health and wellness.
Principal Heriberto Cordero praised the teamwork involved — the weekly meetings of the dropout prevention specialist Dania Torres, along with members of the school-based health clinic, and the way staff flagged kids and intervened as early as possible.
“What’s unique about these awards is you don’t see one person coming up. It’s a team, the nurse, foodworker, custodian, working with little money,” said the school’s Chief Operating Officer Will Clark.
School-based health clinics, now in 17 schools, have been around since the 1990s. In 2000 a campaign to get rid of vending machines purveying junk food in schools triggered a more holistic look at children’s health, and the creation of broader school and districtwide conceptions of child wellness, said Clark.
Nutrition committees were formed and then led to school and district-wide committees to address a wider spectrum of issues affecting kids’ performance in school: their basic health, their emotional lives, the condition of their teeth, the cafeteria food, and the larger atmosphere of trust, security, and positive thinking in a school’s culture.
City Health Director Dr. Byron Kennedy, Interim Schools’ Super Reggie Mayo, Markham, and U.S. Rep Rosa DeLauro, also an awardee.
In this, the 15th year of the health and wellness programs, the Director of School Health Centers Sue Peters pronounced the program successful. Absenteeism, for example, is dropping because its main causes — health and emotional issues — are now being more systematically attended to.
The Coordinated Health Team, which keeps all the moving parts of the system in synch, include Clark, Peters, Director of Coordinated School Health Althea Brooks, SHC Administrative Analyst Liliya Garipova, and CSH Program Administrator Alicia Vignola.
The sumiteers reported that hundreds of kids are coming to school who may have stayed home due to illness because the clinics are intervening with physical exams, immunizations, and the administration on-site of medicines, particularly for asthma — one of the chief reasons for absenteeism, according to Peters.
In addition to schools, community partners and individual kids were hailed at the ceremonies.
The Connecticut Food Bank‘s Senior Director of Programs Maria Markham received an award recognizing the group’s long-time support of the schools and, most recently, bringing “pop up” or mobile food pantries during last year’s summer school to fresh-food challenged neighborhoods in Dixwell, the Hill, West Rock, and other areas.
The health and wellness team at Hill Central was cited for its efforts “to create a healthy, safe, and positive school environment.”
Fontan, bottom left, with her Hill Central team.
Principal Lillian Fontan said all the success is based on teamwork — what she described as a synchronization of services at the school so the kids feel safe, well cared for, and well fed. That means they’re in class more often and learning more.
Fontan said every school morning she and other staff greet almost every kid at the door with a “good morning,” a “buenos días,” or a “how you doing today?” she said.
If she sees a kid who has what she called a “scrunched-up face,” she pulls them aside to figure out what’s up.
She said the kids unburden themselves. Often they say things like, “my mom yelled at me because I didn’t wear my uniform.”
Other times Fontan uncovers something more serious. A child may have just witnessed a family member in an argument or a fight, and that’s been “unsettling.”
If necessary, Fontan refers kids to the school clinic. She always calls the parents to get the parental side as well. If she discovers that there’s a troubling problem at home, like violence or homelessness or a parent hospitalized, or a house without electricity, the school’s family resource center steps into action.
Health hero Villot’s going to college at Southern Connecticut after graduation.
Wednesday’s event also honored high school seniors, 20 kids from ten schools, as “health heroes,” who function as ambassadors for health and wellness in different capacities throughout their communities.
One of them, Noah Villot from New Haven Academy, got interested in sex education when he was a freshman and attended a teen talk on sex presented by Planned Parenthood.
Villot was trained in that group’s Students Teaching About Responsible Sexuality (STARS) program, a peer education program, and was on his way. For the past three years he’s been leading fellow teens in sex education, contraception and abstinence, and reproductive anatomy learning sessions around New Haven.
