The Center for School, Health and Education’s location within the American Public Health Association underscores the fact that high school completion is a public health priority. Educational success starts with healthy students, and students who complete high school are more likely to have a lifetime of better health and economic opportunities.
"K-12 is the opportune time to establish good health behaviors," says APHA Executive Director Georges Benjamin, MD. "By focusing on this population, we hope to provide our nation’s children with a healthy start in life, and positively impact the health of future generations."
CSHE was established within APHA in 2010, seeded by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to build on the success of the School-Based Health Care Policy Program. Launched by the Foundation in 2004, the six-year initiative accomplished extensive local, state and federal policy changes to stabilize and expand school-based health care. Federal policy successes included the adoption of school-based health care as a safety net provider in the 2009 Children’s Health Insurance Reauthorization Program, formerly SCHIP, and authorization for a federal school-based health care grant program in the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the historic health reform legislation.
Governing policy for this focus includes these APHA Policy Statements:
Pilot Program
In March of 2013, CSHE launched a 16-month pilot project in a high school in Detroit and a middle school located on the same campus to implement a new model that expands the role of school-based health centers to prevent school dropout. The two schools were selected for the pilot program because they had historically low graduation rates, shared a school-based health center, conducted school-wide assessments and had the support of school administrators. This project was made possible by funding from the Kresge Foundation and the Aetna Foundation.
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