- Author: Danielle L. Lee
- Contributor: Christina A Hecht
- Editor: Lorrene Ritchie
Meals provided to children at schools–funded by the USDA–help mitigate childhood food insecurity. Despite COVID-19 related school closures beginning March 2020, school districts across California continued to offer meals to children and families. In a recent community-based participatory research study published in the journal Public Health Nutrition, researchers at Stanford and the University of California (UC) Nutrition Policy Institute (NPI) describe challenges and best practices in providing and accessing school meals during COVID-19. Researchers interviewed food service directors, school superintendents, and community partners, and conducted parent focus groups in English and Spanish, in six school districts in California's San Joaquin Valley–a region of predominantly low-income, Latino immigrant families. For schools, the leading barriers were developing safe meal distribution systems, boosting low participation, covering COVID-19 related costs and staying informed on policy changes. Families named transportation difficulties, safety concerns and lack of fresh food as major barriers to taking school foods. Researchers also identified pandemic-electronic benefit transfer (P-EBT), bus-stop meal deliveries, community meal pick-up locations, batched meal service and leveraging partner resources as innovative strategies for continuity in offering meals despite school closures. The study was conducted in partnership with two non-profit community organizations–Cultiva La Salud and Dolores Huerta Foundation–that work towards health equity and social justice in the San Joaquin Valley. The paper's authors were Ashley Jowell, Janine Bruce, Gabriela Escobar, Valeria Ordonez and Anisha Patel of the Stanford University School of Medicine and Christina Hecht of NPI. The study was funded by the Stanford Center of Excellence in Diversity in Medical Education and Office of Faculty Development and Diversity, Stanford Medical Scholars Research Program, the American Heart Association Voices for Healthy Kids, and the San Joaquin Valley Health Fund.
- Author: Danielle L. Lee
- Contributor: Christina A Hecht
- Editor: Lorrene Ritchie
The Lead and Copper Rule (LCR)–a U.S. federal regulation under the administration of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)–limits the concentration of lead and copper allowed in utility-provided tap water. The LCR provides requirements for various actions to monitor and reduce lead and copper content of tap water and to inform the public. The EPA recently undertook the first revision of the LCR in 30 years with the Trump administration publishing final revisions on January 15, 2021. However, on January 20, 2021, the Biden administration issued a Regulatory Freeze Pending Review memorandum to ensure any new or pending rules be reviewed by the new presidential appointees or designees and be re-opened for public comment. The EPA posted an extension of the effective date of the revised LCR on April 14 to enable the agency to seek further public input, particularly from communities most at-risk of exposure to lead in drinking water. Nutrition Policy Institute's (NPI) Christina Hecht and Angie Cradock of the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health submitted one of the over 20,000 public comments providing recommendations for the final revision of the LCR. Hecht and Cradock's comment focused on school drinking water safety, providing recommendations based on their findings from a comprehensive study of states' school drinking water lead testing initiatives and lead test results. Their recommendations included: testing all taps used for human consumption in school and childcare facilities, rather than the subset–5 taps in schools, 2 in child care–required by the earlier proposed revision; a faster timeline for initial testing of all taps; and a lower action level for lead in tap water.
Nutrition Policy Institute's Gail Woodward-Lopez co-authored a commentary in JAMA Pediatrics on the importance of body mass index assessment (BMI) and surveillance in schools. The commentary was written in collaboration with Anisha Patel of the Stanford Medicine Department of Pediatrics and Emma Sanchez-Canaugh of the San Francisco State University Department of Public Health. Woodward-Lopez and co-authors highlight the benefits of and need to sustain BMI screening and related school-based surveillance systems despite recent research suggesting that BMI screening and reporting in schools was not associated with reductions in student BMI. They suggest that these systems are important to maintain in order to evaluate policy and program effectiveness at the school and state level, monitor population trends and disparities, and identify places and populations requiring targeted obesity interventions. The commentary was published online on February 22, 2021.
- Author: Danielle L. Lee
Daily physical activity supports youth physical and phychosocial health and is also important for obesity prevention. Schools are an important location for physical activity promotion and obesity prevention given youth spend up to half of their waking hours in school. The latest study from Nutrition Policy Institute (NPI) researchers suggests that United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education (SNAP-Ed, and known asCalFresh Healthy Living (CFHL) in California) physical activity interventions at school-sites are associated with slightly lower body mass index (BMI) and greater cardiovascular fitness in students compared to sites that did not receive these interventions. Further, schools with higher intervention levels had students with the highest cardiovascular fitness levels. Interventions included physical activity-related direct education, where students were actively engaged with an educator; indirect education, where students received information or resources related to physical activity; or changes to the school or district's physical activity related policies, systems, and/or environments (PSE). Student-level FitnessGram(R) data from between 2015-2016 was obtained from the California Department of Education for the study. Researchers compared BMI and student cardiovascular fitness levels from over 97,000 fifth and seventh grade students from 904 California public schools that implemented the SNAP-Ed physical activity interventions to over 372,000 fifth and seventh grade students from 3,506 California public schools that did not implement the interventions. These findings are important as the California Department of Public Health's Nutrition Education and Obesity Prevention Branch distributes over $50 million in CFHL funding to local health departments to implement physical activity and nutrition interventions, which primarily occur in the public school setting. Also, California has more public schools than any other US state. The study was published online in the journal Preventive Medicine Reports. The study was conducted by NPI's Hannah Thompson, Sridharshi Hewawitharana, Janice Kao, Carolyn Rider, Evan Talmage, Wendi Gosliner and Gail Woodward-Lopez in collaboration with Lauren Whetstone of the California Department of Public Health. The study was funded by the California Department of Public Health, with funding from the USDA Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The full study is available online.
- Author: Danielle L. Lee
In May 2020, Nutrition Policy Institute researchers Suzanne Rauzon and Hallie Randel-Schreiber collaborated with Kaiser Permanente, Alliance for a Healthier Generation, and other national school health partners to survey educators across the nation about overall readiness to return to learning for the upcoming school year. Their results are available in a new research report released in July 2020, which describes the anticipated school health challenges, needs and priorities for schools in Fall 2020. Using findings from a survey and interviews of school staff and school health experts, the report examines the health challenges that are anticipated and resources needed to promote the physical and social-emotional health of the school community. It also includes reflections on the unexpected benefits or “silver linings” of the extensive disruption, rapid adaptations and changes experienced in spring 2020. The full report is available online.