Weller Center partners with students to create health risk behavior survey

(Emmaus, Pa.) For more than a year, the East Penn School District’s Take Back Our Children community task force worked to identify the type of destructive decisions their students were making.

The Weller Health Education Center knew that the best way to find out was to ask the kids.

In January 2005, the Weller Center began developing a first-of-its-kind baseline survey to measure the prevalence of health-risk behaviors specific to East Penn students.

Working with researchers from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) School of Public Health, the Weller Center developed the self-administered survey instrument consisting of 32 multiple choice questions and two open-ended questions.

To create a customized testing instrument with questions that best represented the issues faced by the East Penn School District, the Weller Center conducted several focus groups with students.

“The fact that students themselves played such a large role in developing the survey tool is what makes this project so unique and successful,” said Melissa Lee, president and CEO of the Weller Center.

The survey was administered on May 19, 2005 to 886 students in grades seven through 12.

Although she’s pleased the district scored better in many areas compared to national data, Lee said the Weller Center will now work with East Penn to identify the critical issues highlighted in the survey and implement age-appropriate, outcomes-based preventive health education programs. Preliminary areas of focus include body weight, emotional health and harassment.

“From the beginning, the district has been ready and willing to tackle these issues head-on,” said Lee.

“We look forward to partnering with them to develop and implement a comprehensive, measurable preventive health education program through which we can help change kids’ lives and reduce destructive decision making in the district,” she added.

Lee envisions a multi-year, multi-grade-level approach to educating students and helping reduce health risk behaviors.

Air Products funded the baseline survey project and has committed continued funding toward the targeted intervention to be provided by the Weller Center.

"We chose to get involved with this project because it is a unique public/private partnership. On the public side you have the East Penn School District and the Weller Health Education Center who have brought their skills and expertise to bear in order to identify and address issues that are impacting how students make decisions. On the private sector side, you have funding partners such as ourselves who will fund the program's implementation instead of having to turn to taxpayers," said Kassie Hilgert, Manager, community relations and philanthropy.

"We have heard from other potential funding partners who have expressed an interest in participating in this program and we look forward to engaging them in the very near future," Hilgert added.

The Weller Center has begun working with other Lehigh Valley school districts to customize and implement their own health risk behavior surveys.

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About the Weller Health Education Center

The mission of the Weller Health Education Center is to measurably improve children’s lives by giving students the tools they need to make informed and healthy life choices. To accomplish this, each year the Center partners with more than 500 schools to supplement and enhance the teaching of health, character education and life science for students grades K through 12. The Center was the first not-for-profit health promotion, disease prevention education facility of its kind in Pennsylvania. Serving more than 1.2 million children since our inception in 1982, the Weller Center remains the only such center in our 39-county service area and one of just 34 health education centers across the nation.