Increase the capacity of elementary, middle and high schools to provide comprehensive school health education and put into place comprehensive school health systems. Background School Health Connections recognizes that schools alone cannot promote the health of our youth. Major implications for both academic excellence and quality of life are obvious. To understand how schools could prevent major health problems from occurring through primary prevention, one must first understand the nature of these problems. Decades of research validate the importance of health education and the school health program preventing these behaviors.
Health education is taught like other important academic subjects.
CDC and the California Department of Education believe that comprehensive school health education in the larger context of the Coordinated School Health Program System can be more effective and efficient than school efforts to address single categorical topics without a broader program framework for school health education. Coordinated, comprehensive health education, in the larger context of the comprehensive school health program or system, is addressed in our Physical Education Framework and is a cornerstone of our Health Framework.