10/18/2002 Verizon Funds Website Upgrades

(Easton, Pa.) With a $25,000 grant from The Verizon Foundation, the Weller Health Education Center is enhancing its website and making vital health information more accessible to students and teachers across the region.

The Weller Center will develop a web-based multimedia presentation that will provide an orientation to the Center and help students prepare for their upcoming health education programs. Students and teachers will be able to click on various program areas to explore the learning objectives for each program prior to their visit. Teachers will also see just how each program meets the state academic standards in health and science.

The Weller Center will also create an online message board for students to access in the weeks following their Weller Center programs. This message board will allow students and teachers to communicate directly with the Center’s health education professionals and anonymously ask questions on their program topic for up to two weeks following their visit to the Weller Center.

“By helping the Weller Center upgrade its website, we’re providing teachers with a new and different way of using the Internet for student research in the classroom, which is a priority of the Verizon Foundation,” said Daniel J. Reavy, Director – External Affairs, Verizon Pennsylvania.

“The project also helps the Weller Center maximize the impact of its programs by allowing the thousands of students and teachers they serve to access important health-related information before and after their Weller Center programs.”

Other website upgrades will include adding educational games for students, making the organization’s newsletter available online and providing an interactive map through which schools can obtain door-to-door driving directions to the Center. 

The new website features will also be designed to accommodate students who participate in the Weller Center’s in-school assemblies. The website upgrades will be completed by December of this year.

The Weller Center seeks to measurably improve lives by giving children the tools they need to make informed and healthy life choices. Offering more than 30 programs in general health, character education, drug abuse prevention, growth and development and nutrition and fitness, the Weller Center partners with school districts to provide interactive curricula-based health science programs for more than 60,000 students each year from 39 counties in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Programs are available at the Weller Center’s Easton facility or as in-school student assemblies.

The Weller Center was the first nonprofit health promotion, disease prevention education facility of its kind in Pennsylvania. Serving nearly 950,000 students since 1982, the Weller Center remains the only such center in the region–and one of just 33 health education centers in the nation. 

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