The Healthy Schools Toolkit was launched in summer 2019 after two years of research with two St. Louis school districts. The toolkit is designed to help education leaders build healthy school communities that support the whole child and lead to student success.
The Healthy Schools Toolkit is grounded in the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) model, a framework that highlights 10 areas where schools need to focus in order to support children who are healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. This toolkit is designed to help school and district leaders organize to build a culture of health and well-being. It is hands-on and user-friendly so it works within the everyday constraints of running a complex school community. Arranged into three sections, or modules, this step-by-step toolkit guides school and district leaders in the use of social science tools that can accelerate systems change.
The toolkit was released by the Health Equity Works team in collaboration with the Evaluation Center. The project is part of the Together for Healthy and Successful Schools initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Nikole Lobb Dougherty, Associate Director, of the Brown School Evaluation Center served as Co-Director of the Healthy Schools Toolkit project with Director, Dr. Jason Purnell.
During the next phase of work, from September 2019 to August 2020, the Evaluation Center will partner with Health Equity Works to develop and implement an evaluation of national dissemination efforts of the toolkit. They will also design a process and outcome evaluation of a learning community that utilizes the toolkit, to be implemented in spring 2020.