文章基本信息

标题：Toward a Healthy High Schools Movement: Strategies for Mobilizing Public Health for Educational Reform
本地全文：下载
作者：Jessica Ruglis ; Nicholas Freudenberg
期刊名称：American journal of public health
印刷版ISSN：0090-0036
出版年度：2010
卷号：100
期号：9
页码：1565-1570
DOI：10.2105/AJPH.2009.186619
语种：English
出版社：American Public Health Association
摘要：Although research shows that education and health are closely intertwined, health professionals have difficulty using this evidence to improve health and educational outcomes and reduce inequities. We call for a social movement for healthy high schools in the United States that would improve school achievement and graduation rates; create school environments that promote lifelong individual, family, and community health and prevent chronic illness, violence, and problems of sexual health; and engage youths in creating health-promoting environments. Achieving these goals will require strengthening and better linking often uncoordinated efforts to improve child health and education. Only a broad social movement has the power and vision to mobilize the forces that can transform educational and health systems to better achieve health and educational equity. In 1997, the World Health Organization noted, “Schools could do more than any other single institution to improve the well-being and competence of children and youth.”¹^(p1) Yet in the United States, more young Black men move from high schools to prison than to higher education² and more pregnant young women drop out of high school than graduate.³ In 2007, more than 6 million students in the United States between the ages of 16 and 24 years dropped out of high school,⁴ putting them at risk for lifetime economic, social, and health disadvantage.⁵ In this commentary, we call on public health professionals to contribute to an emerging social movement for healthy high schools that can reverse these dismal statistics, thus offering millions of young people a safer path to healthy and productive adulthood and our nation a road to ending the health and educational inequities that continue to shame us. A healthy high schools movement would seek to improve school achievement and graduation rates; create school environments that promote lifelong individual, family, and community health; and focus on prevention of chronic illness, violence, and problems of sexual and mental health. It would also work to engage youths in creating health-promoting school and community environments.