Kramer Kcffi Final 052909

Assessing the Food and Fitness Environments of Neighborhood Schools in Delridge and White Center

Donald Jerome Kramer

A Professional Project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Urban Planning

University of Washington 2009 Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Department of Urban Design and Planning

   

University of Washington Department of Urban Design and Planning This is to certify that I have examined this copy of a professional project by Donald Jerome Kramer

and have found that it is complete and satisfactory in all respects, and that any and all revisions required by the final examining committee have been made.

Committee Members:

__________________________________________________ Branden Born Ph.D.

__________________________________________________ Joaquin Herranz Jr., Ph.D.

___________________________________________________ Erin MacDougall Ph.D.

Date:___________________________

   

In presenting this professional project in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a master’s degree at the University of Washington, I agree that the Library shall make its copies freely available for inspection. I further agree that extensive copying of this professional project is allowable only for scholarly purposes, consistent with “fair use” as prescribed in the U.S. Copyright Law. Any other reproduction for any purposes or by any means shall not be allowed without my written permission. Signature ____________________________________________ Date ________________________________________________

   

If you have questions or comments about this paper, please contact Don Kramer at [email protected]. For more information about the King County Food and Fitness Initiative, visit www.kcffi.org.

   

University of Washington

ABSTRACT ASSESSING THE FOOD AND FITNESS ENVIRONMENTS OF NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOLS IN DELRIDGE AND WHITE CENTER By Donald Jerome Kramer, 2009, 85 pages. Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Branden Born Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Planning. The King County Food and Fitness Initiative (KCFFI) is a collaborative of local and regional organizations and public agencies in King County, Washington, organized to implement the Food and Fitness Initiative, a multi-year grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The Initiative is intended to generate systems-level changes that improve the food and fitness environments of entire communities. The focus communities of the KCFFI are Delridge and White Center, adjacent neighborhoods in southwest Seattle and in unincorporated King County, respectively.

The KCFFI received a two-and-a-half year planning grant from the Kellogg Foundation in 2006 and must submit a Community Action Plan to the Foundation in September 2009 that outlines how the KCFFI will use the five-year implementation grant. During summer 2008, the author was one of six students from the University of Washington who participated in a ten-week applied urban planning course in collaboration with the KCFFI. The final product of the course was a neighborhood-level community food system assessment and built environment assessment. The course did not focus specifically on schools.

One purpose of this professional project is to present a survey methodology and survey tool the KCFFI can use to gather baseline information about food and fitness in schools. For the purposes of this paper, the food environment includes foods available to students in schools and nutrition education. Fitness environments include physical education and    

physical activity in school and active transportation to and from school. This paper includes the author’s methodology and a copy of the survey. Another purpose of this project is to give the KCFFI a compendium of relevant policies and programs that federal and state governments and school districts develop, fund and/or regulate that affect food and fitness at schools. This information provides context about the larger policy environment within which schools operate.

Based on the author’s research and analysis of these policies and programs, several potential opportunities may exist for the KCFFI to influence food and fitness in schools through collaboration with schools or through advocacy for policy changes. This paper does not, however, make specific recommendations for action. KCFFI leadership will decide how to plan and implement the initiative. Understanding where these policies and programs originate, knowing about existing programs at schools in the focus communities that could be replicated or serve as a resource, and collecting the survey results can help the KCFFI leaders as they decide what to include in the Community Action Plan.

   

   

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ iv LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................................... v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ vi EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ............................................................................................................. 1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................... 4 KCFFI Background...................................................................................................................... 4 The KCFFI Focus Communities .................................................................................................. 6 Public Agency Health Data and Indicators About the Focus Communities .............................. 11 Schools in the Focus Communities ............................................................................................ 11 Purpose....................................................................................................................................... 17 Audience .................................................................................................................................... 18 Professional Planning Context ................................................................................................... 19 How To Use This Document ..................................................................................................... 21 METHODOLOGY ........................................................................................................................ 22 Developing the Survey ............................................................................................................... 22 Testing the Survey ..................................................................................................................... 25 Training Others to Conduct Survey ........................................................................................... 25 Collecting Survey Results .......................................................................................................... 26 Policy and Program Research Methodology .............................................................................. 28 UW Human Subjects Division Approval of Protocol ................................................................ 29 DISCUSSION OF SURVEY AND POLICY RESEARCH PROCESS ........................................ 30 Reflections on Methodology ...................................................................................................... 30 Initial Observations .................................................................................................................... 35 Survey Questions and Related Policy and Program Sources ..................................................... 37 POLICIES AND PROGRAMS THAT AFFECT SCHOOLS ....................................................... 39 School District Wellness Policies .............................................................................................. 40 Foods Available in Schools ....................................................................................................... 43 i   

    Federal School Food Programs............................................................................................. 45 National School Lunch, School Breakfast and Afterschool Snacks Programs ...................... 46 Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program...................................................................................... 48 Summer Food Service Program ............................................................................................. 50 Competitive Foods ................................................................................................................. 51 Pricing ................................................................................................................................... 53 Drinking Water ...................................................................................................................... 54 Food Environment Near Schools ............................................................................................... 55 Nutrition Education .................................................................................................................... 56 School Gardens ...................................................................................................................... 58 Physical Education ..................................................................................................................... 60 Recess ........................................................................................................................................ 62 Community Access to School Recreation Facilities .................................................................. 64 Active Transportation ................................................................................................................ 65 Safe Routes to School Program ............................................................................................. 67 Safe Walking Route Maps for Focus Community Schools ..................................................... 71 Summary of Potential Opportunities for KCFFI........................................................................ 75 CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................................. 81 Lessons Learned......................................................................................................................... 81 Potential Opportunities .............................................................................................................. 84 REFERENCES .............................................................................................................................. 87 APPENDIX .................................................................................................................................... 93 KCFFI Collaborative Partners, as of May 12, 2008 .................................................................. 94 KCFFI Leadership Council Members, as of May 11, 2008 ....................................................... 95 KCFFI Assessment Team Members, Affiliation and Focus, as of January 2009 ...................... 96 KCFFI School Survey Interviewer Instructions......................................................................... 97 KCFFI School Survey ................................................................................................................ 99 Oral Consent Statement for Interviewees ................................................................................ 108 School District Contact Information ........................................................................................ 109 State and Other Agency Contact Information .......................................................................... 110 ii   

    Safe Routes to School/Active Transportation Resources......................................................... 111 Highline Public Schools nutrition standards ............................................................................ 112 Seattle Public Schools distribution and sales of competitive foods procedure ........................ 114 Seattle Public Schools nutrition education procedure.............................................................. 118   

 

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LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1. Map of KCFFI focus communities. ................................................................................ 10 Figure 2. Map of schools in KCFFI focus communities. ............................................................... 14 Figure 3. Detail of survey results collection file ............................................................................ 27 Figure 4. Safe walking route map, Roxhill Elementary School..................................................... 74 Figure 5. Safe walking route map, Mount View Elementary School. ........................................... 75 

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LIST OF TABLES Page Table 1. Public schools in KCFFI focus communities. .................................................................. 12 Table 2. Student demographics. ..................................................................................................... 15 Table 3. Student demographics: ethnicity. ..................................................................................... 16 Table 4. Student demographics: special programs......................................................................... 17 Table 6. Survey questions and related policy and program sources. ............................................. 37 Table 7. Activities to encourage biking and walking at three focus community schools. ............. 69 

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Prepared for: King County Food & Fitness Initiative. Special thanks to: • Branden Born Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Planning, College of Built Environments, University of Washington. • Joaquin Herranz, Jr. Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Public Affairs, Evans School of Public Affairs, University of Washington. • Erin MacDougall Ph.D., Healthy Eating and Active Living Program Manager, KCFFI Project Director, Public Health Seattle – King County. Thanks also to staff from Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association, White Center Community Development Association, Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, Highline Public Schools, and Seattle Public Schools who helped with this project.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This professional project paper presents my policy research and the school survey I developed for the King County Food and Fitness Initiative (KCFFI) in winter and spring 2009. The KCFFI is a collaborative of community organizations, citywide and regional organizations and public agencies organized for the purpose of implementing the Food and Fitness Initiative, a multi-year grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The Food and Fitness Initiative is intended to generate systems-level changes that improve the food and fitness environments of entire communities.

The KCFFI focus communities are Delridge and White Center, two adjacent neighborhoods. Delridge is in southwest Seattle and White Center is in unincorporated King County. The KCFFI Co-conveners used a Request for Qualifications process to select these two neighborhoods based on three criteria: a history of food and fitness efforts, a history of collaboration and evidence of community outreach experience.

The KCFFI received a two-and-a-half year planning grant from the Kellogg Foundation in 2006 and must submit a Community Action Plan to the Foundation in September 2009 that outlines how the KCFFI will use the five-year implementation grant. During summer 2008, I was one of six students from the University of Washington (UW) Department of Urban Design and Planning (UDP) who participated in a ten-week applied urban planning studio course in collaboration with the KCFFI. The final product of the studio was a document titled Food For Thought: Groundwork for the King County Food and Fitness Initiative, which included our neighborhood-level community food system assessment and built environment assessment for the KCFFI (University of Washington 2008). Our assessments did not focus specifically on the food and fitness environments within neighborhood schools.

   

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One purpose of this professional project is to provide the KCFFI a school survey and methodology Initiative participants can use to gather site-specific information about the food and fitness environments at schools in the focus communities that they can consider while developing the Community Action Plan summer. For the purposes of this paper, the food environment includes foods available to students in schools and nutrition education. Fitness environments include physical education, physical activity and active transportation to and from school. The other purpose of this project is to give the Initiative information about policies and programs developed by entities outside the schools that affect the food and fitness environments within schools.

This paper includes the methodology I used to develop and test the school survey, how I trained community members to use the survey and a compendium of relevant policies and programs that affect food and fitness in schools. The scope of my professional project included developing and testing the survey, training community members to conduct the survey and compiling and analyzing relevant school-related policies and programs. Due to the timing of this project, only survey results from the three schools I surveyed in April and May 2009 were available at the time I prepared this paper. I have included in the paper a method KCFFI participants can use to compile and evaluate the survey results they collect this summer. The paper also includes a thorough reference list and appendix that provide additional sources of information for the KCFFI.

I was unable to find a similar document that includes a compendium of federal, state and Seattle and Highline school district policies that affect the schools in the KCFFI focus communities. Nor did a survey tool exist that specifically addresses the range of topics of interest to the KCFFI. In short, this document and the survey are unique in their relevance to this particular Initiative, but I believe the methodology I used could be replicated elsewhere to produce a similar paper about school food and fitness environments in other focus communities.    

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The primary audiences for this paper include the following groups involved in the KCFFI: Leadership Council, focus community lead organizations, Co-conveners, assessment team and evaluators, and the youth agency coordinator. Each of these groups will be described in the Introduction. Other potential audiences include the KCFFI Collaborative Partners, which include representatives of 60 community-based groups and other organizations from throughout the county who are concerned about food and fitness. An additional potential audience may be the eight other Food and Fitness collaboratives around the U.S. that received funding from the Kellogg Foundation.

This paper includes the following sections: •

Executive Summary.

•

Introduction.

•

Description of the methodology I used to develop and test the survey and evaluate the survey results.

•

Description of the methodology I used to collect and analyze the policy information.

•

Policies and programs that affect school food and fitness environments.

•

Conclusion.

•

References.

•

Appendix.

In addition to this paper, I will give the KCFFI Co-conveners an electronic copy of the survey, consent statement, survey instructions, and an Excel file for the survey results.

   

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INTRODUCTION

This section provides background information about the KCFFI, a description of the geographic area and demographics of the KCFFI focus communities, the purpose and intended audience of this professional project, a description of the planning context of this professional project, and a brief note about how to use this document.  

KCFFI Background The King County Food and Fitness Initiative (KCFFI) is a collaborative formed in 2006 to plan for and implement a five-year Food and Fitness Initiative grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The Foundation selected nine sites across the United States to participate in this Initiative. The Food and Fitness Initiative is one of several W.K. Kellogg Foundation programs and is consistent with the Foundation’s overall mission: “The W.K. Kellogg Foundation supports children, families, and communities as they strengthen and create conditions that propel vulnerable children to achieve success as individuals and as contributors to the larger community and society” (W.K. Kellogg Foundation n.d.).

The Kellogg Foundation’s focus for the Food & Fitness Initiative is systems-level changes that improve the food and fitness environments of entire communities (W.K. Kellogg Foundation n.d.). Locally, the KCFFI vision follows this systems-level focus by looking at the whole community: “Creating vibrant communities that support access to locally grown, healthy, affordable food and safe and inviting places for physical activity and play—for everyone” (KCFFI 2008) The KCFFI mission is "to foster collaborative leadership among diverse community partners to co-create long-term, innovative strategies to realize our vision of equitable access to resources and choices that promote health. To achieve our goals, we actively engage with communities and youth in planning, decision making, and fun activities" (KCFFI 2008)    

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The KCFFI is currently in the two-and-a-half year planning phase of the Initiative. Initiative leaders are preparing a Community Action Plan to submit to the Kellogg Foundation this summer in preparation for the eight-year implementation and evaluation phase of the Initiative. If the Kellogg Foundation approves the KCFFI Community Action Plan, between two and four million dollars will be available from the Kellogg Foundation to implement and evaluate the plan.

The KCFFI leadership is structured as several groups: the Leadership Council, two focus community lead organizations, Co-conveners, an assessment team and evaluators, and a youth agency coordinator.

The 18-member Leadership Council includes residents of Delridge and White Center and representatives from organizations focused on food and fitness (see Appendix for a member list). The role of the Leadership Council is to offer guidance and leadership in the planning phase of the Initiative (KCFFI 2008).

The focus community lead organizations are the Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association (DNDA) and the White Center Community Development Association (WCCDA). The youth coordinator is the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, an independently operated branch of the DNDA. These organizations conduct outreach to the two focus communities.

The Co-conveners of the KCFFI are staff members from Public Health Seattle – King County and WSU King County Extension. The role of the Co-conveners is to coordinate the overall management of the Initiative and Kellogg Foundation grant, interactions with the foundation, and the Initiative planning and implementation process. My primary contact for this project is Erin MacDougall, Project Director for KCFFI at Public Health Seattle – King County.    

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The ten member assessment team is comprised of faculty, researchers and staff from UW, WSU, Public Health Seattle – King County, and WSU King County Extension (see Appendix for a member list).

Other organizations that are part of the KCFFI are Collaborative Partners. KCFFI describes this group of 60 organizations as “a cross section of organizations and leadership including grassroots groups, community-based organizations and institutions representing the local food system and physical activity constituencies, public health and health care, education, recreation, economic development, transportation, urban and rural planning groups, faith-based organizations, corporate sector, and employer groups.” (see Appendix for an organization list). The role of this group is to help guide and set the Initiative agenda (KCFFI 2008)

The KCFFI Focus Communities The KCFFI site selection committee selected Delridge and White Center based on a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) process. The RFQ document states that one community will be in Seattle and the other in South King County (KCFFI 2007 2). The RFQ includes three criteria on which applicants were judged (KCFFI 2007 3): •

History of food and fitness-related efforts - evidence of past work related to KCFFI goals of promoting access to healthy, affordable food and creating safe and convenient places for physical activity.

•

History of collaboration - evidence of community partners and residents working well together including how long and how effective the partnerships and resulting accomplishments were.

•

Community engagement - evidence of effectively involving diverse residents and community members in past projects, and quality and feasibility of plans to engage residents in KCFFI.

   

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During summer 2008, I was one of six students from the University of Washington (UW) Department of Urban Design and Planning (UDP) who participated in a ten-week applied urban planning studio course in collaboration with the KCFFI. The final product of the studio was a report titled Food for Thought: Groundwork for the King County Food and Fitness Initiative, that includes our neighborhood-level community food system assessment and built environment assessment for the KCFFI (University of Washington 2008). The Food for Thought report includes a detailed description of the KCFFI focus communities that is excerpted below (University of Washington 2008 6): Delridge: A Bird’s Eye View The Delridge neighborhood is located on the southern edge of Seattle and is adjacent to and north of White Center. The greater Delridge area includes 36,585 residents (University of Washington 2006, App. 5.2). The neighborhood boundary, as defined by the Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association (DNDA), is the area south of Southwest Spokane Street and the West Seattle Bridge, east of 35th Avenue Southwest, west of 1st Avenue South and West Marginal Way, and north of Southwest Roxbury Street (Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association n.d.). A 2006 UW Planning Studio report (University of Washington 2006 2-3) notes: “Delridge is an ethnically diverse community; minority groups comprise about half the population. Incomes also vary extensively, with the average household income in Delridge just slightly lower than state and county figures. . . .Delridge is most strongly characterized by residential neighborhoods, but it is also home to a variety of large and small businesses. While single-family homes are most common, townhomes and apartment buildings also have a notable and growing presence. Amongst the homes and businesses is extensive green space, including unique natural amenities such as Longfellow Creek and the Legacy Trail. . . A significant asset of the Delridge neighborhood is its extensive network of open space, trails and staircases. . . The current housing market in Delridge is in a rapid state of transition, with older single-family homes and apartment buildings being demolished and replaced with townhouses and four-plexes. This transition is threatening the availability of rental units and producing new housing that is outside of the price range of the average Delridge    

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resident. With the recent growth and development along Delridge Way, business owners and community members are increasingly optimistic about business growth.” The Seattle Times also described the changes occurring in Delridge as housing becomes increasingly unaffordable for many residents of a neighborhood that has traditionally been home to blue-collar workers and immigrants (Young 2007). White Center: A Bird’s Eye View White Center is located immediately south of Delridge, between Seattle and the city of Burien (Figure 1). The population of the neighborhood is 20,975 (Public Health Seattle – King County n.d.). White Center includes approximately 3.67 square miles of unincorporated area in King County. Public Health Seattle – King County identifies White Center as the area west of State Route 509 and north of Southwest Roxbury Street, north of Southwest 126th Street and extending west to 30th Avenue Southwest. A 2007 UW Planning Studio report (University of Washington 2007 2) notes: “The population of White Center includes an extremely diverse working class, with people of color making up nearly 50% of the community. In addition, over a quarter of the residents in the area are people under the age of 18. This vibrant character and unique diversity is White Center’s greatest asset, but the community faces substantial challenges as well. Income, employment, and education levels in White Center are lower on average than those in the rest of King County, and crime and health problems tend to be higher than elsewhere in the county. Compounding these problems is the fact that White Center is an unincorporated area of King County and does not have the resources to address many of these issues. …White Center is a neighborhood in transition due to inherent pressures from population growth, poverty, annexation discussions, and the threat of gentrification. Maintaining the diversity and character of the neighborhood in the midst of change will be a challenge, yet the community has clearly indicated that preserving the unique character of the neighborhood is vitally important.”

   

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Neighborhood Boundaries 1 For the purposes of this report, the class used the Health Planning Area (HPA) boundaries defined by Public Health Seattle – King County, as some of the health data is collected at that level of analysis and HPAs can serve as rough approximations of the formal neighborhoods. However, the streets used to define neighborhood areas for the HPA may differ from the formal boundaries.”

                                                             1

This report uses the same boundaries that the class used in summer 2008.

   

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Figure 1. Map of KCFFI focus communities.

   

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Public Agency Health Data and Indicators About the Focus Communities The Washington Department of Health, Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, Department of Social and Health Services/Division of Alcohol and Substance Abuse, Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development, Family Policy Council, and Liquor Control Board collaborate on the Healthy Youth Survey (HYS), which covers several topics, including diet and physical activity (Washington Dept. of Health n.d.). Students in the sixth, eighth, tenth, and twelfth grades completed the survey in 2002, 2004 and 2006. State and county-level data are available online. School district-level and school-level data are available at the request of the district superintendent (Beck 2009). 2

Public Health Seattle – King County publishes community health indicators for the county, but most indicators are about the adult population, not school-age children and youth. A summary of these indicators for the KCFFI focus communities is included in the 2008 Food for Thought document (University of Washington 2008).

Schools in the Focus Communities The focus communities include a total of 15 public schools: 11 elementary schools (ES), two middle schools (MS) and two high schools (HS) (see Table 1). In addition to the schools in the KCFFI focus communities, I added a 16th school, West Seattle High School, to the schools list for the purposes of this paper and the school survey based on input from youth at Youngstown Cultural Arts Center who attend the school. The schools are in two schools districts: Delridge schools are in the Seattle Public Schools district, and White Center schools are in the Highline Public Schools district. Figure 2 below shows the geographic distribution of the 16 schools.

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I was unable to locate a copy of school-district-level or school-level reports from either district as of the time of this writing.

   

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Table 1. Public schools in KCFFI focus communities. School Beverly Park Elementary School Cascade Middle School Cedarhurst Elementary School Evergreen High School Campus Hilltop Elementary Mount View Elementary School Southern Heights Elementary School White Center Heights Elementary School Cooper Elementary School 3 Denny Middle School Highland Park Elementary School Roxhill Elementary School Sanislo Elementary School Sealth High School West Seattle Elementary School West Seattle High School

School District Highline Highline Highline Highline Highline Highline Highline Highline Seattle Seattle Seattle Seattle Seattle Seattle Seattle Seattle

The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) is the state education agency for Washington. OSPI publishes annual school and school district-level demographics and academic performance data. The demographic data from OSPI in Tables 2, 3 and 4 below are about students at schools in the KCFFI focus communities (Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction 2008). OSPI data reflect changes in student demographics in both districts during the past five years. Increases or decreases of five percent or more are highlighted in green in Table 2 to show the highest changes in student demographics. In some cases, the change is greater than ten percent. Similarly, increases or decreases of five percent or more in the percentage of students participating in the free and reduced meal program are highlighted in table 3. 4 In two cases, the                                                              3

The Seattle Public Schools Board approved a Capacity Management Plan in January 2009 that will close Cooper Elementary School next fall and relocate students to other sites. For the purposes of this professional project, Cooper Elementary remains on the list and map. 4 I was unable to compare 2002-2003 and 2007-2008 data for percentage of students in special education, transitional bilingual programs or migrant status because the 2002-2003 data reports for all the schools in the KCFFI focus communities list 0 for those three categories.

   

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percentage increased more than ten percent and in one case the percentage decreased more than ten percent.

   

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Figure 2. Map of schools in KCFFI focus communities.

   

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Table 2. Student demographics.

School

Highline School District Beverly Park ES Cascade MS Cedarhurst ES Evergreen HS Campus Hilltop ES Mount View ES Southern Heights ES White Center Heights ES Seattle Public Schools Cooper ES Denny MS Highland Park ES Roxhill ES Sanislo ES Sealth HS West Seattle ES West Seattle HS

Student Demographics (2002-2003 and 2007-2008) Students Male 2002- 2007- 2002- 200703 08 03 08 17,735 17,331 51.5% 51.4% 537 455 48.8% 45.5% 709 550 50.9% 54.5% 330 433 55.8% 53.3% 1,183 4* 51.6% 25.0% 660 563 50.3% 51.2% 475 595 54.3% 48.2% 319 363 48.0% 52.9% 404 456 50.0% 52.0% 47,853 45,581 51.3% 51.0% 368 266 50.3% 48.5% 814 622 50.0% 50.5% 429 405 51.7% 52.3% 302 253 57.9% 57.7% 324 312 52.2% 47.1% 978 913 50.0% 49.8% 282 271 50.0% 55.7% 1,053 1,240 54.3% 52.4%

Female 2002- 200703 08 48.5% 48.6% 51.2% 54.5% 49.1% 45.5% 44.2% 46.7% 48.4% 75.0% 49.7% 48.8% 45.7% 51.8% 52.0% 47.1% 50.0% 48.0% 48.7% 49.0% 49.7% 51.5% 50.0% 49.5% 48.3% 47.7% 42.1% 42.3% 47.8% 52.9% 50.0% 50.2% 50.0% 44.3% 45.7% 47.6%

Highlighted cells = >10% increase or decrease between 2002-2003 and 2007-2008                                

   

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Table 3. Student demographics: ethnicity. Student Demographics – Ethnicity, as percent of enrolled students (2002-2003 and 2007-2008) School Am. Asian Black Hispanic White Indian/AK Native 2002 2007 2002 2007 2002 2007 2002 2007 2002 2007 -03 -08 -03 -08 -03 -08 -03 -08 -03 -08 Highline 2.1 2.0 20.7 21.2 13.3 14.5 17.9 27.0 45.9 35.2 School District Beverly Park 2.0 1.3 28.9 16.0 11.5 23.5 33.3 38.0 24.2 21.1 ES Cascade MS 3.0 2.0 29.9 35.8 13.8 14.5 14.4 30.9 38.9 16.7 Cedarhurst 1.5 1.6 21.8 23.3 7.3 11.1 19.7 40.0 49.7 23.1 ES Evergreen 2.1 25.0 34.3 50.0 12.5 ND 16.4 ND 34.7 25.0 HS Campus Hilltop ES 3.9 1.6 24.5 25.4 17.0 13.7 20.9 42.6 33.6 16.7 Mount View 3.6 2.4 36.8 35.8 9.7 14.6 26.3 31.3 23.6 15.6 ES Southern 0.6 0.6 22.3 31.4 9.4 9.9 24.1 34.2 43.6 23.1 Heights ES White Center 0.5 1.5 45.0 43.0 21.5 20.0 19.3 23.9 13.6 11.6 Heights ES Seattle 2.0 2.1 23.3 22.1 23.0 21.3 11.0 11.6 40.1 42.8 Public Schools Cooper ES 1.6 0.4 27.4 19.2 34.5 42.1 17.9 20.3 18.5 18.0 Denny MS 4.4 4.5 22.1 20.4 23.5 26.7 21.3 23.0 28.7 25.4 Highland 3.3 2.5 35.2 30.9 15.6 18.3 27.3 31.9 18.6 16.5 Park ES Roxhill ES 2.0 2.8 21.2 22.5 22.5 23.7 33.1 37.2 21.2 13.8 Sanislo ES 3.1 1.9 34.9 27.6 19.1 16.0 15.1 11.9 27.8 42.6 Sealth HS 3.1 3.6 26.4 21.2 17.5 29.1 22.6 22.0 30.5 24.0 West Seattle 2.8 4.1 30.5 21.8 39.0 33.6 19.1 23.2 8.5 17.3 ES West Seattle 3.3 2.5 23.2 22.2 14.6 16.0 11.2 15.5 47.7 43.8 HS ND = No data Highlighted cells = >5% increase or decrease between 2002-2003 and 2007-2008    

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Table 4. Student demographics: special programs. Student Demographics – Special Programs, as percentage of students (2002-2003 and 2007-2008) School Free/Reduced Special Ed Transitional Migrant Price Meals Bilingual 2002- 2007- 2002- 2007- 2002- 2007- 2002- 200703 08 03 08 03 08 03 08 Highline School 50.5 56.7 11.4 12.6 10.7 18.6 0.0 0.0 District Beverly Park ES 71.3 79.0 0.0 11.2 0.0 28.5 0.0 0.0 Cascade MS 59.2 72.8 0.0 15.3 0.0 18.3 0.0 0.0 Cedarhurst ES 56.0 71.0 0.0 11.8 0.0 33.7 0.0 0.0 Evergreen HS 53.6 ND 0.0 ND 0.0 ND 0.0 ND Campus Hilltop ES 63.2 72.0 0.0 11.3 0.0 31.7 0.0 0.0 Mount View ES 72.1 71.1 0.0 14.8 0.0 31.8 0.0 0.0 Southern Heights ES 59.7 69.2 0.0 14.0 0.0 26.6 0.0 0.0 White Center Heights 88.1 85.5 0.0 11.7 0.0 35.5 0.0 0.0 ES Seattle Public 41.9 40.5 13.0 13.9 12.1 11.8 0.4 0.5 Schools Cooper ES 78.3 79.5 0.0 21.2 0.0 33.2 0.0 1.5 Denny MS 65.3 64.1 0.0 16.7 0.0 12.2 0.0 0.5 Highland Park ES 66.7 74.0 0.0 11.7 0.0 25.7 0.0 1.2 Roxhill ES 84.7 77.4 0.0 29.6 0.0 34.3 0.0 1.5 Sanislo ES 59.6 50.2 0.0 9.2 0.0 19.4 0.0 0.0 Sealth HS 52.3 60.9 0.0 13.4 0.0 17.9 0.0 3.1 West Seattle ES 97.1 78.9 0.0 25.9 0.0 32.3 0.0 0.0 West Seattle HS 34.3 34.2 0.0 11.8 0.0 7.6 0.0 0.2 ND = No data Highlighted cells = >5% increase or decrease between 2002-2003 and 2007-2008 Purpose The purpose of this professional project is to provide the Co-conveners, focus community lead organizations, and the Leadership Council a survey tool that can be used at the 16 schools, a way to collect the survey results, training to individuals interested in conducting the survey, and a compendium of the various policies set by agencies outside the schools that affect the food and fitness environments in the schools. Like the survey,    

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the policy section is intended to give the Initiative participants a snapshot of the existing conditions and context within which schools operate with regard to food and fitness.

The information from the survey will give the KCFFI baseline information about a range of topics related to food and fitness in the schools. This survey tool can then be used in the future to assess changes in the school environments and progress toward the KCFFI goals. The immediate goal is for the KCFFI leaders to have information about schools they can use as they develop the KCFFI Community Action Plan during summer 2009.

The Kellogg Foundation recognizes the role schools can play in child health and development: “The school system domain, especially the institutional policies that govern site selection, curriculum, and off-hours use of school facilities, can either encourage or inhibit physical activity among children” (W.K. Kellogg Foundation 2008 1). In addition, the KCFFI values include “meaningful youth participation”(KCFFI 2008). Given this focus on schools, children and youth, the KCFFI should understand the food and fitness environment in the schools in Delridge and White Center as the leadership develops the Community Action Plan and for future implementation and evaluation in the KCFFI focus communities.

Audience The primary audiences for this paper are the KCFFI Leadership Council, focus community lead organizations, youth coordinator, Co-conveners, and assessment team. A secondary audience is the KCFFI Collaborative Partners, which include representatives of 60 community-based groups and other organizations from throughout King County who are concerned about food and fitness. Other potential audiences may be the Food and Fitness collaboratives at the other eight sites in the U.S.

   

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Professional Planning Context This project is consistent with professional planning practice. This paper includes analysis of existing policies and programs and a method for community members to gather information about existing conditions in the focus community schools. Existing conditions reports and state of the community reports provide a basis for planning processes, community participation in planning and for future assessment of progress (Berke, Godschalk et al. 2006). The information community members gather using the survey in this paper can provide both a baseline or snapshot of existing conditions and a way to assess changes in the school food and fitness environments in the future.

The policy and program section of this paper gives KCFFI leaders additional information about policies and programs that affect food and fitness environments in schools, and may offer potential areas for systems-level change. Gathering and analyzing information about community characteristics are part of many planning processes (Hoch 2000),

In addition, I trained four community members during this project to conduct the school surveys, rather than conducting surveys at all 16 schools myself. This is consistent with planning norms that support public participation in the planning process and the KCFFI mission to “foster collaborative leadership among diverse community partners to cocreate long-term, innovative strategies to realize our vision of equitable access to resources and choices that promote health. To achieve our goals, we actively engage with communities and youth in planning, decision making, and fun activities” (KCFFI 2008).

Public participation in planning is not new and strategies and purposes vary. Arnstein (1969) describes a ladder of citizen participation, on which participation can move from simply informing and consulting citizens to partnerships and citizen control of the planning process. Kretzmann et al (1993) focus on including community members and organizations as a way to build community visions and strategies based on existing community assets. Berke et al (2006) describe collaborative planning in the context of    

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consensus-building processes and that inclusive participation is one of the distinguishing characteristics of consensus-building. Martz (1995), Burby (2003) and Sirianni (2007) each describe the positive impact of public participation in local planning on implementation of plans.

One form of public participation is participatory action research (PAR), a method by which community members conduct planning, research or information gathering. PAR is “a way for professional researchers and community residents to collaborate on investigations into issues - such as housing, healthcare, and environmental conservation with the goal of achieving positive social change. PAR values both scholarly and community-based perspectives to address questions related to living conditions, services, and policy, in order to make life better for people living in a given community, as defined by that community” (Center for Cultural Understanding and Change n.d.).

A study of the use of PAR in building healthy communities describes a distinctive aspect of PAR as “not the methods employed, which may be either quantitative or qualitative, but the active involvement of the people whose lives are affected by the issue under study in every phase of the process” (Minkler 2000 192) and characterizes PAR as: •

Participatory.

•

Cooperative, engaging community members and researchers in a joint process in which both contribute equally.

•

A co-learning process for researchers and community members.

•

A method for systems development and local community capacity building.

•

An empowering process through which participants can increase control over their lives by nurturing community strengths and problem-solving abilities; and a way to balance research and action.

The methodology I used to develop the survey included input and feedback from community lead organizations. The survey implementation includes youth from    

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Youngstown Cultural Arts Center. Representatives of the community lead organizations will be responsible for collecting the survey results and working with the Co-conveners to summarize the results for use in the Initiative planning process this summer. That planning process includes the community lead organizations. These methods are consistent with the descriptions of PAR and public participation described above.

How To Use This Document This paper includes a detailed description of the methodology I used to develop the school survey. Readers can find in the Appendix a copy of the survey instructions, consent statement for interviewees and the survey itself. The policies and programs section of the paper will give the reader background information on relevant policies and programs that will be useful - along with the survey results - to get a better picture of the overall environment within which schools operate. Sources are cited throughout the paper and readers can use the Reference list to find more details about the sources. In addition to the survey and related documents, the Appendix includes contact information for relevant local and state agencies. The reader can use these contact lists to find additional information about specific topics in the paper.

   

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METHODOLOGY

This section describes the methods I used to develop the school survey, the training for community members, and the policies section. Because survey results from several schools will be available after I complete this professional project, I have also included a method the KCFFI can use to compile survey results as additional data becomes available this summer.

Developing the Survey The survey included in this report (see Appendix) is based on several sources and on feedback from KCFFI leaders who reviewed the draft survey during winter 2009. Sara Coulter, a graduate student in the public health program at UW, compiled a draft list of school-related questions and topics in spring 2008 based on her review of assessment guidance from the Kellogg Foundation, information from KCFFI Project Director Erin MacDougall and from research Ms. Coulter conducted with two other UW graduate students, Kara Martin and Torence Powell, also in spring 2008 (Coulter 2008) under the guidance of UW Assistant Professor Branden Born. That research was the groundwork for some of the neighborhood-level food system and built environment assessments that were the subject of the summer 2008 planning studio course, also overseen by Born, described in the Executive Summary. As noted, that studio course did not focus specifically on the food and fitness environment in schools.

My work on this survey used this previous research as a starting point. Based on discussions with MacDougall and Born, I first separated the site-specific questions and topics from those that are school district, state or federal government level issues. My draft survey included all the topics on the initial list I received at the start of my work on this project in winter 2009. At that point in the planning process for the Initiative, the participants had not yet decided where to focus the Initiative in the Community Action    

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Plan, and wanted information about a broad range of topics related to school food and fitness environments. Future surveys may focus on fewer topics with greater depth.

I contacted KCFFI assessment team members in December 2008 and January 2009 to get their input. The assessment team is comprised of individuals with professional and academic research experience and assessment expertise. This input was necessary to ensure the survey format, content and scope will generate information the Initiative needs in a way that is also replicable at all 16 schools.

At the suggestion of several assessment team members, I also looked at existing surveys and assessment tools to find possible questions or formats that might be useful for this survey. I reviewed assessment tools on the National Cancer Institute Risk Factor Monitoring and Methods web site, the Michigan State University Extension Team Nutrition web site, the School Health Policies and Programs (SHPPS) questionnaires and School Health Index (SHI) from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Family Cook School Community Food Assessment toolkit, assessments the John C. Stalker Institute of Food and Nutrition at Framingham State College (Mass.) developed, a New Mexico Department of Transportation assessment tool for neighborhood streets, and a Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) survey of school vending machines.

I also looked at assessment guidance from the Kellogg Foundation and other questions that were the result of research conducted by the three graduate students working with Professor Born in spring 2008. The purpose of this additional research was to find existing questions or formats that others have used to assess school environments that may also be useful in this setting.

All of these other assessment tools and guidance provided some suggestions for specific questions or ways to format questions and answers, but the time limitation to conduct the    

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KCFFI survey and the breadth of topics in the KCFFI survey required a limited number of questions for each topic. Many of these other assessment tools are very extensive but only cover one topic, such as the CSPI survey about vending machines or the SHPP assessments which cover several topics. The CDC estimates each topic in the SHPP to take approximately an hour. Other evaluation tools, such as the Michigan State University Extension evaluation tools, are more subjective or qualitative evaluations.

Based on conversations with community leads and with Donna Johnson, an assessment team member and UW faculty member who has conducted research at schools, I made every effort to shorten the survey so that interviewers would need no more than 45-60 minutes to conduct the entire survey, which covers a range of topics about food and fitness, school facilities for students, existing programs, and community access to school facilities. I tried to minimize the number of open-ended questions because of the expected time limitations and also tried to include more objective measures of the school’s characteristics so the results would be easier to compare with future survey results.

I drafted an initial set of questions in February 2009 that I sent to the assessment team and Co-conveners to review. By March 2009, the KCFFI had also developed a detailed list of potential strategies and tactics the Initiative may consider as it develops the Community Action Plan (Krieger, MacDougall et al. 2009). That list includes, but is not limited to, school-related strategies and tactics. I revised the draft survey in March 2009 to include questions based on specific school-related strategies and tactics in that document to ensure the survey addresses issues of interest to the Initiative. While that document is not the same thing as the Community Action Plan, it was an early effort by the Initiative leaders to begin identifying potential strategies and tactics. All topics in the potential school-related tactics are consistent with the topics I already covered in the draft survey, but I added some new questions based specifically on the potential tactics.

   

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The review process continued for several drafts until April 2009. The KCFFI Project Coordinator mailed and e-mailed a letter from me to the principal each of the 15 schools in the focus communities in March 2009 to let the principals know about the upcoming KCFFI school survey. 5 In April 2009, I contacted three schools in Delridge and White Center to request meetings with the principals so that I could conduct the survey myself to understand how the survey works and make adjustments to the survey as needed before giving the final version to the community lead organizations. The community lead organizations will then identify interested community members who will then conduct the survey at the remaining 13 schools this summer.

Testing the Survey I conducted the survey with the principal at Sanislo Elementary on April 10, 2009, the principal at Roxhill Elementary on April 17, 2009 and the Physical Education instructor at Southern Heights Elementary on May 12, 2009. I selected three schools so that I could test the survey at schools in each of the two school districts. I chose three schools where, based on feedback from the community lead organizations, the community leads did not already have good contacts, so that the community leads could focus on schools where they might be able to more quickly set up appointments and conduct the survey later based on existing relationships with the school principals or other staff.

Training Others to Conduct Survey I met with the Founding Director and staff from Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, and the KCFFI Project Director on May 4, 2009 at the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center to provide a brief overview for the community leads about the survey purpose, content, instructions for conducting the survey, and to discuss which schools they would be willing to survey. In addition, I met with Youngstown staff and four youth at the center on May 13, 2009 to review the survey purpose, how to set up meetings with school                                                              5

I added West Seattle High School to the schools list in May (see Introduction).

   

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administrators and answer any questions they had about survey questions or the procedure for conducting the survey. Each of the community lead organizations is responsible for community outreach for the Initiative and, therefore, will identify staff or volunteers to conduct the survey at the 13 remaining schools in the focus communities.

Collecting Survey Results I created a spreadsheet file in Microsoft Excel with two sheets: one for Seattle schools and another for Highline schools. Within each sheet, I grouped schools by grade level (elementary, middle or high schools) I grouped the schools this way for multiple reasons: each district has separate policies that affect school operations, schools differ from the elementary to high school levels, and including all 16 schools in one sheet would result in a spreadsheet too wide to print. The file includes spaces for all 41 survey questions, space for additional comments from the interviews that were not included in the survey answers (e.g. additional comments following a question with a Yes/No answer), and space for the interviewer observations of crosswalks and sidewalks around the school.

The individual(s) who summarize the data after it is in the file will need to manually summarize the responses. Summarizing the responses in a narrative format should be feasible since there are only 16 schools. In addition, I found no easy way to electronically summarize the answers.

Figure 3 below is a detail view of the Excel file I created for the purpose of collecting and storing the school survey results for all 16 schools. I will compile survey results in this file in May and give an electronic copy of the file to the KCFFI Project Director in early June 2009. Excel should be sufficient because I am using the program primarily as a table. Excel is easy to use for this purpose and is a widely available program. A database is unnecessary for the collection of this survey information because of the small number of schools and difficulty finding a commonly used and easy to use database program.    

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Figure 3. Detail of survey results collection file

The KCFFI has developed a draft of potential strategies and tactics the Initiative may focus on in the Community Action Plan, including several school-related tactics (KCFFI 2009). Many of the questions in the latest version of the survey are based on specific tactics in that document so that the survey results will provide information that helps the Initiative decide which strategies and tactics to include in the Community Action Plan this summer. Readers can focus on the specific survey questions and results related to school gardens, for example, and, based on the survey results for those particular questions, decide how to prioritize the potential tactics related to school gardens that the Initiative leaders developed in March 2009.

I did not develop a method of scoring or ranking answers that allows the Initiative to calculate an overall score or rating of the school. The purpose of the survey data is to provide baseline information about a range of school characteristics that, while related in a broad sense, are difficult to score that still allows the reader to differentiate in a meaningful way (e.g. Is a school with a garden but no Safe Routes to School program    

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“better” than a school with a SRTS program but no garden? How would that score help the KCFFI decide where to focus its resources?) Finding a way to produce an overall score or evaluation of the food and fitness environment of a school would also be challenging given the fact that the survey only looks at site-specific characteristics, which, by definition, leaves out many elements (e.g. the school lunch program) that do enhance the food and fitness environment of the schools. Finally, producing an overall evaluation or score could distract from the Initiative’s efforts to find specific areas to focus the Initiative’s resources within schools and other environments in the focus communities in the coming years.

I will provide an electronic copy of the Excel file I created for compiling the survey results to KCFFI Project Director by June 1, 2009 and will include instructions about how to input survey results. Staff from either the Co-conveners or one of the community leads will input the survey results after the remaining 13 surveys are completed.

Policy and Program Research Methodology The purpose of this section of this paper is to provide the Initiative an overview and analysis of policies and programs developed by entities outside the schools that affect the food and fitness environments in schools. These entities may include school districts, the state of Washington and the federal government, and programs such as Safe Routes to School. I found much of the information for this section from online sources, including school district web sites, state and federal government agency web sites, and nonprofit organization web sites. I spoke on the telephone with school district nutrition services staff from both districts and physical education staff from the Seattle district office (see Appendix for district staff contacts), and individuals at organizations such as Feet First, a local pedestrian advocacy organization, when I needed additional information or

   

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clarification of certain policies or programs. 6 Based on conversations with Erin MacDougall and Branden Born, I developed the following method to describe and organize this information: I describe the policy, where it originated, what it does, and how it affects schools in the focus communities. I have also noted whether questions about the topics are included in the school survey. All sources are cited and contact information, web site URLs and other resources are in the References section and/or Appendix.

UW Human Subjects Division Approval of Protocol As a graduate student at UW conducting surveys and gathering information from individuals for the purposes of developing knowledge about the schools in the focus communities, my work meets the UW Human Subjects Division (HSD) definition of research (UW Human Subjects Division 2008). The UW HSD approved my project protocol in February 2009 (Maman 2009). Consistent with HSD rules, I developed an oral consent statement that I read to each person I interviewed at the three schools where I tested the survey (see Appendix). Although UW required this statement only for interviews conducted where the information will be included in this paper, much of the background information in the statement would be useful for any interviewer to read before starting the interview to explain the purpose of the research, how the information will be used (i.e. the information is not confidential), and the rights of the interviewee.  

                                                             6

I was unable to speak with nutrition education staff in either district or the PE manager for Highline Public Schools by the time of this writing.

   

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DISCUSSION OF SURVEY AND POLICY RESEARCH PROCESS  

As noted in the Introduction, one purpose of this professional project is to provide the KCFFI a survey tool Initiative participants can use to collect site-specific information about school characteristics and a way to collect the survey results. The Methodology section describes how I prepared the survey and conducted the survey at three schools before handing off the survey to the community leads to use at the remaining schools.

This section of the paper includes my reflections on developing and testing the survey and the policy research process. I also discuss ways the KCFFI might improve this method in the future. This section also includes my observations of survey results from three schools I surveyed in April and May 2009. I also connect the survey questions to the relevant policies that I will describe in further detail in the next section of the paper.

In general, I think this document is unique but my methodology is transferrable to studies of school food and fitness environments in other communities. I have compiled information about federal, state and Seattle and Highline school district policies that affect the schools in the KCFFI focus communities. I have also developed a survey tool that specifically addresses the range of topics of interest to the KCFFI. While this document and the survey are unique in their relevance to the KCFFI, the methodology I used is transferrable to other communities interested in producing a similar paper about school food and fitness environments.

Reflections on Methodology The school survey I developed is intended to provide the KCFFI with baseline information about food and fitness environments in schools now and serve as a way to measure changes in schools in the future as the Initiative implements its Community Action Plan. One potential limitation of using questions based on assessment guidance    

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from the Kellogg Foundation or other existing assessment tools is that they may not provide information related to the specific areas of most interest to the local Initiative.

As noted in the Methodology section, when I began work on this project in winter 2009, the KCFFI leaders had not yet decided where to focus the Initiative in the Community Action Plan, and wanted information about a broad range of topics related to school food and fitness environments. I addressed these potential problems by including questions about school-related potential tactics the KCFFI identified in winter 2009 and by asking for feedback about the draft survey from the KCFFI assessment team throughout the survey development process. Working with multiple stakeholders to develop the survey, including the KCFFI Co-conveners, assessment team and other Initiative participants, provided a thorough review of the survey questions and overall methodology.

The survey I developed using this method will allow the Initiative to collect the information about school characteristics, programs and policies that are of interest to the Initiative at this point in the planning process. KCFFI leaders may decide to conduct other quantitative or qualitative surveys of parents, teachers, students or other community members now or as part of an evaluation later if they decide additional views on the same topics would be helpful to the Initiative, but such surveys were beyond the scope of my professional project.

I was able to cover the topics the KCFFI identified in a survey length that was acceptable to the three individuals I surveyed. (i.e. none of the interviews was longer than 30 minutes and none ended before I asked all the survey questions.) I, therefore, did not have to choose whether to limit the number of topics. Initiative leaders may face such a tradeoff between including a broad range of topics or focusing on a narrower set of topics either this summer as Initiative leaders decide on topics for the Community Action Plan or in future evaluation surveys. While the survey I developed does gather information about many topics, the Initiative may want to follow up with schools on specific areas of    

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interest as those become clearer this summer. Choosing to focus on fewer topics with greater depth in the future, however, may be appropriate and may provide the type of information of interest to the Initiative for other surveys at that time.

Another limitation of this methodology is the potential for errors or inconsistent results if multiple individuals conduct the survey. I addressed this by reducing jargon in the survey questions and limiting open-ended questions so questions are easy for interviewers to explain, easy for principals and others to understand, and responses are easy to record and compile. As noted above, however, Initiative leaders may want to add more open-ended questions in future surveys to gather more in-depth information about certain topics.

An additional limitation is the potential for variations in data as a result of revisions to the survey following my initial test of the survey at three schools. I did not add new questions as a result of testing the survey. I made minor changes to some questions to make them easier to read and made minor changes to checklist answers for two questions to better capture possible answers to those questions. Adding more questions, or more open-ended questions, would require reducing the topics covered or require more time to conduct the survey. Given the comments I heard from assessment team members about the limited time I should expect with principals, extending the time needed to conduct the survey did not seem like a good idea. One potential issue this presents is that I would have had to conduct the survey – or parts of the survey – again at the first three schools had I decided it was necessary to make substantive changes to the content of the survey, so that the Initiative used the same survey at all 16 schools.

Based on my experience, I feel a separate food survey and fitness survey is unnecessary. I would suggest in the future using a different survey for each school level, however, to make the survey more clear for the interviewer. Some questions are only for elementary schools, others for high schools. After talking with individuals who will conduct the survey at middle schools and high schools, I realized that compiling all topics and    

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questions in a single survey could be confusing to interviewers. I addressed this by noting which questions are for elementary schools and which for high schools, but a separate survey document for school grade level might be more helpful.

Conducting the survey at three schools in April and May 2009 gave me the opportunity to both see how the survey worked and an opportunity to introduce school administrators to the KCFFI. The KCFFI leadership can establish new relationships with local schools or build on existing relationships through the process of conducting this survey.

One topic that came up during conversations with assessment team members and community lead organizations was whether I would conduct the survey with teachers, parents and students. Based on early conversations with the Project Director, we determined the focus for this survey would be principals or other school administrators. The reason for this was that this survey is intended to gather primarily quantitative information about school characteristics, programs and policies rather than qualitative information about school food and fitness. This should reduce some potential problems associated with interviewing only one person or only interviewing the principal rather than interviewing a large group of staff, parents or others at each school. A more qualitative survey could generate useful information for the Initiative but was outside the scope of my project.

A tradeoff I faced with this methodology is the potential limitation of conducting the survey with one person at each school. While the two principals and one teacher I spoke with when I tested the survey answered all the survey questions, this may not be the case at all schools as the community leads conduct the survey at the other 13 schools, and may require speaking with additional staff to obtain a response to each survey question. The survey includes instructions for the interviewer to obtain names and contact information for other staff if the primary interview subject does not know the answer to a question.    

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In addition, limiting the survey to one or even a few staff members at a school limits the information to that which the principal or other staff person can provide. While principals likely know the answers to many of the questions about school facilities and programs, some questions are specific to the classroom and, therefore, principals may not know the answer or have the same information a teacher might have. One example is the question regarding which foods, if any, are used in classrooms as a reward or for celebrations. This may be something that a teacher could answer more accurately. The Initiative needs to bear this in mind when reviewing the survey results.

I found the survey to be easy to conduct but also feel that my effort to address so many different topics in as brief a time as possible limited my ability to follow up on some questions where additional information might be helpful. I heard from assessment team members while revising the draft survey questions that I would probably have very limited time to meet with school principals, so I made every effort to limit the number of open-ended questions and the total number of questions.

While this survey will provide good baseline information this year, additional discussions with assessment team members and individuals who conduct the survey this summer would be helpful before conducting this survey as a follow up to the Initiative implementation in future years. Their feedback and input will be useful to determine whether the same format and same set of questions would still be useful or whether to focus only on the topics that are the focus of the Initiative implementation.

While the survey addresses site-specific characteristics of schools, the survey topics are related to policies and programs developed and administered outside schools. Some of the policies I describe in the next section include specific requirements and expectations. While the survey I developed is not intended to be a monitoring tool, the process of conducting the survey does offer an opportunity to learn about the extent to which policies are being implemented. This provides some measure of accountability because    

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community members are asking questions related to the implementation of specific policies and programs.

In addition, asking community members to conduct the surveys rather than conducting the survey myself at all 16 schools is a way to engage community members in the Initiative that can encourage their interest in what is happening in local schools and benefit from their knowledge of the focus community schools. Actively engaging community members in planning and decision-making is part of the KCFFI mission (KCFFI 2008).

One limitation of the methodology for the policy section is the list of policies and programs is not exhaustive and could be longer. As noted, I started with a list of topics and questions that were the result of earlier research for the Initiative and limited my work to the topics on that list based on discussions with the KCFFI Project Director.

Initial Observations Conclusions about trends among all 16 schools would be premature since I surveyed only three schools in April and May 2009, all three were elementary schools and they were from each of the two districts. A few initial observations are worth noting based on my experience at these three schools, however. KCFFI leaders may want to pay attention to the following topics as additional survey results come in from other schools to see whether these are trends. •

All three schools I surveyed have gardens that they use for educational purposes. The type varies from a single garden to planter boxes. While the two districts do not have specific school garden policies, this may be a potential opportunity for follow up if the Initiative decides to focus on school gardens. Schools that already use gardens for educational purposes may be a resource for other schools in the focus communities. In addition, the Initiative may want to follow up to learn how these schools maintain the gardens during the summer growing season and whether this is an area where the  

 

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Initiative could be involved. The survey does not include a follow up question about maintenance of the gardens during the summer. •

Two of the three schools schedule recess before lunch. Both made the change this school year. As I have noted in the section of this paper about recess before lunch, much of the evidence I found about the benefits of recess before lunch elsewhere in the country is very recent and anecdotal, and Seattle Public Schools encourages but does not require recess before lunch. 7 Since this is a relatively new practice, KCFFI may want to follow up with schools that have recess before lunch to understand the barriers and get anecdotal information about the successes and challenges these schools may have experienced during the transition to recess before lunch if the Initiative decides to focus on this.

•

Only one of the three schools sells competitive foods in the cafeteria. That school sells yogurt in addition to the regular school lunch. If few other schools sell competitive foods in the cafeteria, this may be an area the Initiative does not need to focus on in terms of discouraging students from choosing unhealthy competitive foods during meal times. Additional research would be needed to determine if schools are interested in adding healthy competitive food items, particularly if they do not sell any competitive foods now.

•

All three schools are interested in providing free fresh fruits and vegetables. Given the small size of the federal and state Fresh Fruit and Vegetable programs, however, the KCFFI will need to explore how to help schools provide such snacks if additional schools are also interested and the Initiative decides to focus on this type of program.

•

Only one of the three schools had assemblies or other events where the speaker talked about food or health-related topics. If few other schools have had similar events, this could be a possible opportunity for the Initiative, given the range of experience and expertise about food and fitness among the numerous participating organizations.

                                                             7

I did not find a specific policy about this for Highline Public Schools.

   

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•

All three schools indicated they are interested in increasing parental involvement in nutrition promotion activities at school.

•

Two of the three schools do not currently have programs to encourage bicycling and walking. Both indicated they are interested to learn how to incorporate such programs in their schools.

As noted, these initial observations are based on results of only three surveys. Whether these are truly trends will become clearer as the community lead organizations complete the surveys at the remaining 13 schools and review the results. Trends associated with other issues covered in the survey may become more apparent at that time.

Survey Questions and Related Policy and Program Sources While the survey is intended to address site-specific characteristics of schools, the survey topics are related to policies and programs developed and administered outside schools. Table 6 below shows the connection between survey questions and topics and related policies, if a policy exists. The next section of this paper describes these policies and programs in detail.

Table 5. Survey questions and related policy and program sources. Survey Questions and Topics School food service (breakfast, lunch, summer programs, snacks, food source). (Questions 1, 3, 4) Competitive foods (a la carte items in the cafeteria, vending machines, school stores). (Questions 2, 5, 7, 8, 9). Food promotions/advertising. (Question 6). Drinking water. (Questions 10, 35, 36). School gardens. (Questions 11, 12, 13, 14, 15). Fundraising. (Question 16).

Source of Related Policy or Program Federal school food programs, USDA regulations, state OSPI guidelines, school district policies. School district policies and procedures.

School district policies and procedures. School district policies and procedures. No specific district policies. School district competitive food policies and procedures.  

 

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Food in the classroom. (Questions 17, 18). Nutrition education (classroom, assemblies/events). (Questions 19, 20, 21). Health and physical education. (Questions 22, 23, 24, 25). Active transportation (bicycling, walking, crosswalks, sidewalks, other). (Questions 26, 27, 28).

School district competitive food policies and procedures. State laws, OSPI health and fitness guidelines, school district policies and procedures. State laws, OSPI health and fitness guidelines, school district policies. Unable to find specific policy to encourage active transportation. Programs include Safe Routes to School (federal, state guidelines for grants; nonprofit resources for program design). Transportation agencies responsible for streets, crossings and sidewalks. Unable to find state or school district recess policy. Seattle Public Schools encourages recess before lunch. Unable to find specific school district policies that specify which facilities a school should/must have. School district policies and procedures for rental and joint use.

Recess. (Questions 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34). Facilities for PE and recess. (Question 35). Community access to school facilities for physical fitness and recreation. (Questions 36, 37). Injury prevention and safety. (Question 38). Wellness policy implementation. (Question 39).

School district policies. Federal child nutrition law and regulations, state law and regulation, school district wellness policies and procedures. Unable to find specific school district policy.

Employee wellness programs. (Questions 40, 41).

   

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POLICIES AND PROGRAMS THAT AFFECT SCHOOLS

The survey I described above is intended to gather information about site-specific policies and programs initiated inside schools that affect the food and fitness environment in schools.

This section describes policies and programs developed outside the schools that affect food and fitness environments in schools. Several school district, state and federal policies and programs shape the food and fitness environments in schools. In Seattle and Highline schools, for example, district policies related to food services, nutrition and physical education in schools fall under the category of wellness policies. 8 In addition, much of the funding for school food programs is from the federal government.

Understanding these and other policies and programs can help the KCFFI decide where to focus the Initiative’s time and other resources in the Community Action Plan and throughout the implementation of the Initiative. This part of the professional project is intended to provide the Initiative leadership with a compendium of relevant policies and programs that affect schools. This paper is not a typical policy analysis, which would evaluate or compare policies with the intention of providing the reader specific recommendations for action or compare the policies to determine which is better or more effective. The KCFFI leadership has already begun to compile potential strategies and tactics for the Community Action Plan. This section of the paper will add to the information available for consideration during that planning process.

Much of the information for this section is from publicly-available information on school district and other public agency web sites, web sites of organization that develop                                                              8

School district policies and procedures cited in this paper are available on the Seattle Public Schools and Highline Public Schools policies and procedures web pages. Highline Public Schools: http://www.hsd401.org/ourdistrict/board/policies/. Seattle Public Schools: http://www.seattleschools.org/area/policies/index.dxml.

   

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programs such as Safe Routes to Schools, published journal articles and research reports, and telephone conversations and e-mail communications with school district staff. The district wellness policies frame much of this section. Additional topics for this section are based on research that UW public health graduate student Sara Coulter conducted in spring 2008 to identify an initial list of potential school-related issues and survey questions (see Methodology section above for additional information on this research.) I have noted throughout this section where I have included questions in the KCFFI school survey that address the related policy topic.

School District Wellness Policies The federal Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004 (Public Law 108-265) included a provision that requires all local educational agencies participating in programs included in the National School Lunch Program or Child Nutrition Act to establish a wellness policy before the 2006-2007 school year (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture n.d.). The federal law requires the following minimum components of a district wellness policy (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture n.d.): •

"Goals for nutrition education, physical activity and other school-based activities that are designed to promote student wellness in a manner that the local educational agency determines is appropriate;

•

Nutrition guidelines selected by the local educational agency for all foods available on each school campus under the local educational agency during the school day with the objectives of promoting student health and reducing childhood obesity;

•

Guidelines for reimbursable school meals, which are no less restrictive than regulations and guidance issued by the Secretary of Agriculture pursuant to Subsections (a) and (b) of Section 10 of the Child Nutrition Act (42 U.S.C. 1779) and Section 9(f)(1) and 17(a) of the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act (42 U.S.C. 1758(f)(1), 1766(a)0, as those regulations and guidance apply to schools;

   

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•

A plan for measuring implementation of the local wellness policy, including designation of one or more persons within the local educational agency or at each school, as appropriate, charged with operational responsibility for ensuring that each school fulfills the district's local wellness policy;

•

Community involvement, including parents, students, and representatives of the school food authority, the school board, school administrators, and the public in the development of the school wellness policy."

The Washington Legislature enacted state legislation in 2004 (SB 5436) that required school districts to develop wellness policies by August 1, 2005, a year earlier than the federal requirement (Washington Legislature 2004). The state law notes that, although the USDA regulates nutritional content in foods that are part of the federally-reimbursed meal and snack programs, competitive foods are less regulated and may be less healthy. Competitive foods are foods and snacks served in or sold in schools beyond the foods that are part of the federally-reimbursed school breakfast, lunch and snack programs. 9

SB 5436 directed the state school directors association to collaborate with other organizations to develop a model wellness policy to "address the nutritional content of foods and beverages, including fluoridated bottled water, sold or provided throughout the school day or sold in competition with the federal school breakfast and lunch program and the availability and quality of health, nutrition, and physical education and fitness curriculum. The model policy should include the development of a physical education and fitness curriculum for students. For middle school students, physical education and fitness curriculum means a daily period of physical activity, a minimum of twenty                                                              9

The Food Action & Research Center defines competitive foods as “foods and beverages which are offered at school, other than meals and snacks served through the federally-reimbursed school lunch, breakfast and afterschool snack programs. Competitive foods include: extra foods and beverages sold through “à la carte” lines (which offer other food items for sale alongside the federally-reimbursed school meals); snack bars; student stores; vending machines; and fundraisers (where school organizations sell baked goods or candy to raise money.)” Seattle Public Schools uses a similar definition. A la carte items are foods sold in the cafeteria in addition to those offered as part of the National School Lunch Program.

   

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minutes of which is aerobic activity in the student's target heart rate zone, which includes instruction and practice in basic movement and fine motor skills, progressive physical fitness, athletic conditioning, and nutrition and wellness instruction through ageappropriate activities"(Washington Legislature 2004 2). The Washington State School Directors Association published a sample policy and sample procedure in December 2004 (Washington State School Directors Association 2004).

An elected school board in each school district develops and adopts the district-level policies and procedures that govern Highline Public Schools and Seattle Public Schools (Seattle Public Schools 2005; Highline Public Schools n.d.). Policies cover a range of issues, including students, instruction, administration, and facilities. School boards for both Seattle Public Schools and Highline Public Schools have adopted wellness policies and several interrelated food- and fitness-related policies that address the necessary components of the wellness policies. (District wellness policies had to meet state and federal guidelines, but did not need to be a single policy called “wellness policy” (Weyer 2009).) The subsections below describe the elements and requirements of these district policies and procedures.

The various elements that comprise each district’s wellness policy vary in both comprehensiveness and use of direct language, according to a March 2009 evaluation. A team of graduate students from the UW School of Public Health and Community Medicine assessed 19 school district wellness policies in King County in winter 2009. With guidance from Donna Johnson Ph.D., the students developed a methodology to assess 96 policy components of wellness policies using measures of comprehensiveness and strength. The team defined comprehensiveness of the policies as “proportion of policy items that were simply mentioned in the policy” and strength as “proportion of items that were addressed with specific and directive language” (University of Washington 2009 4-5). The Highline and Seattle district wellness policies both scored higher on comprehensiveness than strength, which was consistent with all other districts.    

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KCFFI leaders may want to explore how to include more “specific and directive language” throughout the wellness policies in the two districts to improve the strength of the policies. Given that these are relatively recent policies, however, it may be difficult to advocate for the districts to change them.

Foods Available in Schools Schools have several opportunities to give students access to healthy foods. A combination of federal requirements and state and district policies guide foods available to students in schools. One example is the federal dietary guidelines and school district nutrition services policies that guide the nutrition levels of federally-reimbursed school meals and snacks. These programs reimburse districts for free and reduced price meals to low-income students. Students may also be able to buy food from vending machines or through school fundraisers, which may have fewer nutritional guidelines.

Highline Public Schools’ food service policy directs the district to participate in the USDA school lunch program and follow all USDA requirements for participation (Highline Public Schools 1985). In addition, Highline Public Schools adopted standards in 2007 for nutrition, physical activity and health education. The Highline nutrition standards cover foods throughout the school environment (Highline Public Schools n.d.): •

“In the cafeteria: A la Carte items will meet the nutrition guidelines 10 established for “competitive foods.” School meals will continue to be regulated by USDA requirements based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

•

In the classroom: Food and beverages in the classroom add to the daily calorie intake for children, and these foods displace healthier foods. Foods shall not be used as rewards in the school setting. Also, it is recommended that food used as part of classroom celebrations (birthday parties, Cinco de Mayo, etc) be limited or replaced with healthy foods or non-food celebration activities.

                                                             10

See Appendix for Highline Public Schools nutrition guidelines.

   

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•

In the school environment: The overall school environment should model healthy food choices. Foods and beverages consumed in school as fundraisers are required to meet the standards for competitive foods. For example, Krispy Kreme doughnut sales in the hallway will no longer be allowed. Foods consumed outside of school as fundraisers are recommended to meet the standards. For instance, take-home order forms for cookie dough as part of PTA fundraising are discouraged.

•

In vending machines and student stores: Students should have the opportunity to make healthy snack and beverage choices. Foods sold in vending machines and through student stores must meet the criteria set for “competitive foods.”

Seattle Public Schools policy states that the district will follow USDA nutrition guidelines for school meals provided through the federally-reimbursed programs (Seattle Public Schools 2004). In addition, the district’s policy and procedure for food sales also contain specific nutrition and sales guidelines that apply to competitive foods “whether the food or beverage is served from vending machines, student stores or offered or sold by parent groups, booster clubs, associated student body groups, a la carte sales in lunchrooms, by teachers in class or by others. (The procedures do not apply to meals and snacks brought by students for their individual consumption)” (Seattle Public Schools 2004 1). (See Appendix for food distribution and sales procedure.)

The Washington Legislature enacted the Local Farms-Healthy Kids Act (2SSB 6483) in 2008, which includes several provisions to increase opportunities to link locally-grown products and schools. The Local Farms-Healthy Kids Act created four new programs, including two specifically related to schools: a new Farm-to-School Program within the Washington Department of Agriculture (WSDA) and a new Washington Grown Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Grant Program within the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) (see Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program subsection below for more details). The Farm-to-School Program is intended to facilitate more procurement of    

45   

Washington-grown foods in schools. The law directs WSDA to do the following (Washington Legislature 2008 2): •

“identify and develop policies and procedures, including proposed uniform procurement procedures, to implement and evaluate the program;

•

assist food producers, distributors, and brokers to market Washington grown food to schools by informing them of opportunities and requirements;

•

assist schools in connecting with local producers by informing them of sources, availability and benefits of Washington grown foods;

•

identify and recommend ways to increase predictability of sales and adequacy of supply;

•

identify and make available curricula, programs, and publications educating students on the benefits of preparing and consuming locally-grown food;

•

support efforts to advance other farm-to-school connections such as school gardens or farms, and farm visits; and

•

seek additional funds to leverage state expenditures.”

Federal School Food Programs The federal Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004 11 authorizes federal financial support for several food programs that provide meals and snacks to students locally. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) administers the following school meals programs that are included in the law: the National School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, Afterschool Snacks Program, Fresh Fruit and Vegetables Program, Seamless Summer Program, and the Special Milk Program (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture 2009). The USDA also sets requirements for these school food programs that outline how children qualify for the programs, including free and reduced price meals (see Pricing section below). The availability of free and reduced meals is important, particularly in the                                                              11

Congress will revise the Child Nutrition Act in 2009. The National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program are permanently authorized, but other programs authorized in the law are reauthorized every five years.

   

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KCFFI focus communities, where 2007-2008 OSPI data show that six of the seven Highline schools in the focus communities have free and reduced meal participation rates more than 10 percent higher than the Highline district-wide percentage, 12 and four of the seven Seattle schools in the focus communities have participation rates more than 30 percent higher than the Seattle district-wide percentage (see Table 4 in the Introduction.)

In the state of Washington, school food authorities "participating in the NSLP [National School Lunch Program] and SBP [School Breakfast Program] are required to provide meals that contain one-third of the Recommended Dietary Intakes (RDIs) for protein, calcium, iron, vitamin A, vitamin C and calories with no more than 30% of the calories from fat and no more than 10% of the calories from saturated fat" (Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction n.d.) Highline Public Schools and Seattle Public Schools have adopted district policies regarding the district’s participation in the USDA school food programs (Highline Public Schools 1985; Seattle Public Schools 2004).

National School Lunch, School Breakfast and Afterschool Snacks Programs The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and School Breakfast Program (SBP) provide students free and reduced price meals that must meet federal nutrition guidelines that are based on the 1995 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which recommend "no more than 30 percent of an individual's calories come from fat, and less than 10 percent from saturated fat. [Federal] Regulations also establish a standard for school lunches to provide one-third of the Recommended Dietary Allowances of protein, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, iron, calcium, and calories" (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture 2008 1).The USDA reimburses school districts with cash subsidies and donates commodities for every meal the districts serve.

                                                             12

Data for Evergreen High School was unavailable.

   

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In addition to requiring meals meet the USDA nutrition guidelines, the Seattle district’s breakfast and lunch program procedure includes language about healthy foods that the district should provide, but does not require (Seattle Public Schools 2004 2-3): “Child Nutrition Services should provide the following types of food and beverages whenever feasible and cost effective: •

Food and beverages that are fresh, locally grown or produced, certified organic, unprocessed, non-GMO (do not contain Genetically Modified Organisms) and nonirradiated;

•

Food and beverages that do not contain additives or preservatives;

•

Food and beverages that are low in fat, saturated fat and trans fatty acids, and low in added sugar and sodium;

•

Food and beverages that meet special dietary requirements (such as vegan and vegetarian options);

•

Protein alternatives, such as soy products and non-dairy alternatives, such as soymilk or rice beverages.”

Highline Public Schools also follow USDA nutrition guidelines for participation in the federally-reimbursed breakfast and lunch programs. Both districts participate in a cooperative that includes several school districts in the region to purchase school foods (Neal 2009; Weyer 2009).

In 1998, Congress approved the afterschool snacks program, which allows schools to provide afterschool snacks to students eligible for the free and reduced meals programs. To participate, school districts must be part of the NSLP and “must sponsor or operate an afterschool care program which provides children with regularly scheduled educational or enrichment activities in a supervised environment” (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture 2009). The USDA also provides guidelines for the types of snacks that schools can offer: “the snacks must contain at least two different components of the following four: a serving of fluid milk; a serving of meat or meat alternate; a serving of vegetable(s) or fruit(s) or full    

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strength vegetable or fruit juice; a serving of whole grain or enriched bread or cereal” (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture 2009).

Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program Both the federal government and Washington state government have programs to increase access to fresh fruits and vegetables for snacks in schools. The federal Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program (FFVP) started as a pilot program in 2002. Congress approved additional funding and authorization to expand the program in the years since then and made the FFVP a nationwide program in 2008 (Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction 2009 18). This program gives students in participating schools free fruit and vegetables during the school day. The FFVP has four goals (Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction 2009 18): •

“Create healthier school environments by providing healthier food choices.

•

Expand the variety of fruits and vegetables children experience.

•

Increase children’s fruit and vegetable consumption.

•

Make a difference in children’s diets to impact their present and future health.”

OSPI is the state agency that administers the FFVP program in Washington. OSPI funded the program in 25 Washington schools in the 2008-2009 school year, including one school in the Seattle school district (Concord Elementary) and one in the Highline school district (Madrona Elementary)(Kovacs 2009). No schools in the KCFFI focus communities received federal FFVP grants in 2008-2009.

The Local Farms-Healthy Kids legislation described earlier created the Washington Grown Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Grants Program at 25 schools throughout the state. The program encourages participating schools to incorporate nutrition, environmental education and agriculture stewardship in their program and also gives priority to K-8 schools with more than 50% of students eligible for free and reduced meals (Partners in    

49   

Action 2009). Van Asselt Elementary in Seattle and Beverly Park Elementary in Highline received state FFVP grants for the current school year (Kovacs 2009). Beverly Park is in White Center. OSPI will notify school district nutrition directors in the state when the next grants are available (Washington Dept. of Agriculture n.d.). The Washington Legislature recently cut the funding for this program by 50% in the 2009-2011 budget, which will reduce the number of schools that receive funding from 25 to 12 (Washington Legislature 2009 193).

The USDA noted in a report to Congress the following key factors to the success of the FFVP (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture n.d. 4): •

commitment and support of school and district administration

•

student and parental involvement

•

a school’s ability to purchase a variety of fresh produce

•

partnerships with local farmers

•

use of prepackaged items

•

positive program publicity in the community

The USDA also reported that "schools often noted frequent delivery of produce provides more appealing and fresher products, resulting in more student interest and higher consumption levels. Schools with several years of FFVP experience noted because students have had repetitive exposure to fresh produce and accompanying nutrition education, the students look forward to the fruits and vegetables offered and are starting to think more about a healthy diet. Contributing factors to program success also included the level of State support and non-school partnerships" (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture n.d. 4).

Since the Highline and Seattle districts each have adopted wellness policies, the federal and state governments have fresh fruit and vegetable programs, and the KCFFI is a collaborative effort, the KCFFI may be an effective partner to support or expand fresh    

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fruit and vegetable snack programs in other KCFFI focus community schools. The KCFFI school survey includes a question about interest in providing fresh fruits and vegetables for snacks in schools to better understand the level of interest among KCFFI focus community schools in incorporating such a program. All three individuals at the three schools I surveyed in April and May 2009 are interested in providing free fruits and vegetables as snacks in their schools. In addition, one elementary school in the KCFFI focus communities, Beverly Park Elementary, is an FFVP grant recipient and has experience with this program. That school may be a source of information about how KCFFI could help implement such a program at other schools.

Summer Food Service Program Highline Public Schools and Seattle Public Schools also participate in the USDA Summer Food Service Program, which provides free meals and snacks to students age 18 and younger. Meals must meet the same nutrition guidelines as the other USDA school meal and snack programs and open sites (i.e. sites where any child can get a free meal) are sites in areas where half the children are from families that qualify for the free and reduced meal program (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture 2009). 2009 program sites will be announced later this spring. In the Highline district, the school district sponsors and operates the summer food service program. In Seattle, the City of Seattle operates the summer food service program and Seattle Public Schools provides the food but the City of Seattle operates the program(Weyer 2009).

The City of Seattle operated the summer food service program at 102 sites in Seattle in 2008, including 75 open sites where any student under age 18 could receive a free meal or snack (Seattle Human Services Department n.d.). Seattle program sites in 2008 included the following in the KCFFI focus communities: Delridge Community Center, Denny Middle School, Denny Community Learning Center, E.C. Hughes Playground, Hana Childcare, High Point Community Center, Roxhill Elementary, Safe Futures Youth Center, The Salvation Army, UGM Mt. View Presbyterian,(Seattle Human Services    

51   

Department n.d.) .Additional research is needed to determine how KCFFI can collaborate with the City of Seattle and the two school districts to identify potential Summer Food Service Program sites to ensure eligible students throughout the KCFFI focus communities can easily access a program site.

Competitive Foods As noted earlier, schools can offer foods and beverages in addition to the meals and snacks they offer through the federally-reimbursed programs. Competitive foods can include à la carte items in the lunchroom, foods and beverages sold as part of a fundraising activity or in vending machines or student stores, and foods used in the classroom.

Highline Public Schools and Seattle Public Schools have each adopted nutrition standards that apply to competitive foods in schools. The Seattle district Procedure for Distribution and Sale of Competitive Foods and the Highline district General Guidelines for Competitive Food Sales (see Appendix) include required nutrition standards for competitive foods sold during the school day, portion size guidelines, guidelines for foods sold as part of fundraising activities, and an exemption from the guidelines for competitive foods distributed during class parties or celebrations (Seattle Public Schools 2004; Highline Public Schools n.d.). The Seattle procedure also includes guidelines for vending machines and student stores. Although the Highline competitive foods guidelines do not specifically mention vending machines, fundraisers or student stores, they very clearly state “These guidelines apply to ALL foods sold in schools during the regular school day” (Highline Public Schools n.d. 1).

In addition to competitive foods in the lunchroom, schools are also allowed to have vending machines. Highline district policy allows vending machines “only after the approval of the superintendent and only if the use of such machines does not interfere    

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with school programs” (Highline Public Schools 1985). Highline district procedures provide the following specific guidance about the use of vending machines: •

Principals must make requests to the superintendent for use of vending machines.

•

Products sold through vending machines may not conflict with the health or education or food service programs of the district.

•

Vending machines other than apple and milk machines may not be located in the lunchroom.

•

Vending machines other than apple and milk machines may not be in operation during the regularly scheduled breakfast and lunch periods.

Foods sold in vending machines must meet the Highline school district’s nutrition guidelines (see Appendix).

Seattle Public Schools’ competitive foods procedures (see Appendix) include specific nutritional standards for competitive foods including food in vending machines, pricing procedures and additional requirements of vendor contracts to prevent distribution of free foods or beverages or incentives to increase student consumption of competitive foods and drinks (Seattle Public Schools 2004).

Seattle district procedures acknowledge the potential impact of foods that compete with the USDA school foods programs on students’ choices with regard to nutrition and their health: “The availability of unhealthful food and beverages sold in competition with the federal school meal programs also undermines the financial viability, effectiveness and quality of the school meal programs. Research shows that students who participate in school meal programs have higher intakes of key essential nutrients at lunch and over a 24-hour period. … The availability of non-nutritious foods undermines nutrition education efforts, encourages over consumption of foods high in fat and added sugar, teaches children to associate food with praise and teaches children to eat when they are

   

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not hungry. It also increases the potential for development of eating disorders, food-borne illnesses and food-based allergic reactions” (Seattle Public Schools 2004 1).

Since schools decide which, if any, competitive foods will be available; this may be an area for the KCFFI to collaborate with school administrators to influence healthy food choices. The KCFFI school survey includes questions about the availability of vending machines students can access, vending machine contents, use of vending machine revenue, foods used as part of fundraising activities, competitive foods in the lunchroom and the classroom, and advertising in the school to better understand the availability content and use of competitive foods in KCFFI focus community schools. Only one of the three schools I surveyed in April and May 2009 sells a competitive food item (yogurt). Looking at the responses to these survey questions after all 16 schools are surveyed will give the KCFFI a better understanding of the extent of competitive food availability and content in schools and whether opportunities exist for the KCFFI to work with schools to encourage schools to sell healthy competitive foods. . Pricing The USDA sets the following pricing requirements for meals offered through the National School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, and Afterschool Snacks Program (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture 2008 2): •

“Any child at a participating school may purchase a meal through the National School Lunch Program. Children from families with incomes at or below 130 percent of the poverty level are eligible for free meals. Those with incomes between 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty level are eligible for reduced-price meals, for which students can be charged no more than 40 cents. (For the period July 1, 2008, through June 30, 2009, 130 percent of the poverty level is $27,560 for a family of four; 185 percent is $39,220.)

   

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•

Children from families with incomes over 185 percent of poverty pay a full price, though their meals are still subsidized to some extent. Local school food authorities set their own prices for full-price (paid) meals, but must operate their meal services as non-profit programs.

•

Afterschool snacks are provided to children on the same income eligibility basis as school meals. However, programs that operate in areas where at least 50 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals may serve all their snacks for free.”

Seattle schools can select their own competitive foods, based on the district’s approved snack and vending list (Weyer 2009). In addition, some pricing guidelines are included in the competitive foods distribution procedures that may encourage healthier beverage choices by pricing beverages other than milk higher than the cost of bottled water, and discourage less healthy choices by not allowing incentives for competitive foods or free foods (Seattle Public Schools 2004 2-3). Highline Public Schools has no specific policy regarding pricing competitive foods (Neal 2009)

Given that the USDA sets prices for the school food programs, KCFFI may want to focus on competitive food pricing if schools sell competitive foods that the Initiative wants to discourage (see Competitive Foods section above for competitive foods policies.)

Drinking Water The Seattle Public Schools policy on drinking water quality and access states: “It is the policy of the Seattle Public Schools to provide all students and staff with access to ample quantities of clean, safe, aesthetically pleasing drinking water free of charge at every District facility throughout the school day” (Seattle Public Schools 2004 1). The related Drinking Water Quality and Access Procedure outlines the specific standards the district will follow to exceed minimum standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency,    

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and state and county health agencies to provide safe drinking water (Seattle Public Schools 2004). 13 The school survey asks whether students have access to free, fresh tap water throughout the school day and whether drinking fountains are among the facilities students can access for recess and PE class.

Food Environment Near Schools The focus of this report and the KCFFI school survey is the food and fitness environments within schools. The 2008 report from UW, Food for Thought, includes a neighborhood-level assessment of the built environment in the KCFFI focus communities, including a map and analysis of the types and locations of food sources in the neighborhoods (University of Washington 2008). One area where schools may have some influence on student access to foods near campus during the school day is policies that specify whether students may leave the school campus during the school day.

Highline Public Schools, for example, has the following closed campus policy: “Students shall remain on school grounds from time of arrival until close of school unless officially excused. Juniors and seniors may leave campus during lunch with a verified parent permission form approved by the school administration” (Highline Public Schools 1999). The Seattle Public Schools policy regarding access and egress from secondary schools leaves the decision to individual schools: “It is the policy of the Seattle School Board that secondary schools shall determine restrictions on students’ access to and egress from school grounds during school hours” (Seattle Public Schools 1995). Stronger policies either at the district or school level may reduce student access to unhealthy foods and beverages available in stores near campus during the school day.

                                                             13

I was unable to find a similar specific policy related to drinking water on the Highline Public Schools web site either as a separate policy or reference to drinking water in the district’s facilities-related policies. This may be an area for follow-up with the district if the Initiative decides to focus on drinking water quality and access.

   

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The issue of such campus policies and access to food in the areas around campus came up in my conversations with KCFFI assessment team members and youth at Youngstown Cultural Arts Center. This may be an area for additional research to identify where students go off campus to eat, what foods are available and whether opportunities exist for KCFFI to encourage access to healthy foods at those locations. The Initiative may also want to collaborate with schools to find ways to encourage students to stay on campus rather than leaving campus during the school day.

Nutrition Education The Washington OSPI developed health and fitness standards that include four Expected Academic Learning Requirements (EALR) for health and fitness for K-12 students that include nutrition (see Physical Education section below for detailed explanation of health and fitness standards). To ensure compliance with these expectations, Highline Public Schools and Seattle Public Schools have adopted wellness policies and additional policies and procedures that incorporate nutrition education into the curriculum (Highline Public Schools 2005; Seattle Public Schools 2006; Seattle Public Schools 2006). While the Highline district wellness policy refers to including nutrition in the curriculum, a specific nutrition education policy or procedure is not on the district web site with other board policies. 14

Seattle Public Schools has a clear policy to ensure all students get nutrition education as part of their education, with a goal of “improving attitude and behavior regarding nutritious food choices through a sequential and comprehensive approach. … Using culturally relevant, developmentally appropriate approaches, students will gain an understanding of the relationships among personal food choices, individual health, and environmental impact across food systems and society” (Seattle Public Schools 2006).

                                                             14

I was unable to reach nutrition education staff in either district regarding specific curriculum content.

   

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The related nutrition education procedure (see Appendix) lays out the steps the district will take to implement this policy, including (Seattle Public Schools 2006): •

“A minimum of 10 hours per year of nutrition education shall be allocated for nutrition education lessons. Nutrition education shall be a component of a sequential Health Education Curriculum in all grades from Pre-K to 12.

•

Nutrition education shall be integrated into the curricula of Health Education, Health & Fitness, Science, Family & Consumer Sciences Education core subject areas as appropriate. Nutrition education lessons will support the WA State Essential Academic Learning Requirements, Grade Level Expectations (GLE’s) and Classroom Based Assessments (CBA’s) o Nutrition education at all levels of the district’s integrated curriculum should include, but not be limited to, the following essential components designed to help students learn: Age appropriate nutritional knowledge … age appropriate nutrition-related skills… How to assess one’s personal eating habits, set goals for improvement, and achieve those goals.”

The procedure also includes teacher trainings about nutrition topics, district support of experiential learning through partnerships between the classroom and the cafeteria, district encouragement of “the development of school nutrition councils and policies supporting healthful eating, providing nutrition education through school communications (i.e. newsletters), promoting school gardens and community supported agriculture, encouraging staff to act as role models for healthy eating and developing school wide policies for food allergies” (Seattle Public Schools 2006).

Highline Public Schools provides the following resources to schools to support nutrition education in the classroom: Food Sense CHANGE program (see School Gardens section below), schools can request a nutrition educator to come to the school, and a

   

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comprehensive health and substance abuse prevention program (The Great Body Shop) for use in preschool through middle schools (Highline Public Schools n.d.). 15

School Gardens The Highline and Seattle district wellness policies include nutrition education among the health and fitness elements of the policies, as required by the state law directing districts to establish wellness policies. School gardens are one way to enhance school-based nutrition education. Several research studies cited in a 2005 evaluation of school gardening in California showed that school gardens can have a positive effect on students because they increase nutrition knowledge, improve preferences for fruits and vegetables and enhance nutrition education programs (Graham, Beall et al. 2005), Another study showed adolescents who participated in a garden-based nutrition education program increased servings of fruits and vegetables (McAleese and Rankin 2007). A 2009 review of the impact of garden-based nutrition education also found the potential of such programs to have a positive effect on children and youth in terms of fruit and vegetable intake (Robinson-O'Brien, Story et al. 2009). In addition, a UW graduate student, Aaron Ferguson, is working on a study of school gardens in the Puget Sound region that will be available this summer.

Although the Seattle nutrition education policy described earlier includes promotion of experiential learning opportunities such as school gardens, neither the Highline nor Seattle district has a specific district policy requiring school gardens. The Highline district encourages school gardens in nutrition education by providing information to schools about the Food Sense CHANGE (Cultivating Health and Nutrition through Gardening Education) program on the district web site. The USDA funds and WSU-King County Extension implements Food Sense CHANGE. The program includes the following activities (WSU-King County Extension 2009):                                                              15

I was unable to reach the nutrition and physical education staff person at Highline Public Schools to discuss the district PE curriculum.

   

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•

Use gardening to enhance nutrition education curriculum to improve nutrition of limited income children and their families.

•

Use cooking and other hands-on activities.

•

Provide support system and resource to teachers who are incorporating nutrition education into daily classroom work.

•

Participate in family or adult outreach activities.

Food Sense CHANGE works with the following schools in the KCFFI focus communities (all are in the Highline district): Beverly Park Elementary, Cedarhurst Elementary, Mount View Elementary, Southern Heights Elementary, White Center Heights Elementary (WSU-King County Extension 2008). Schools in King County where 50% or more of students qualify for free or reduced meals are eligible to participate in the Food Sense CHANGE program free of charge.

The Local Farms-Healthy Kids law supports school gardens in two specific ways: the law allows schools to grow food they can use in snack and meal programs (if they meet safety standards), and requires nutrition education about both organic and conventional growing methods to be part of school garden programs (WSU-King County Extension 2008)

Challenges to implementing school gardens do exist. One recent study found the challenges fall into three categories: funding, time and personnel (Ozer 2007). Ozer (2007) also cites an evaluation of a school garden program in Los Angeles that was not sustained for many reasons that could all fit these three categories, which highlights the need to develop support for a school garden program among teachers, administrators, parents, and volunteers.

The KCFFI school survey includes questions about whether the school has a garden, garden size, how the garden is used, whether the site is permanently set aside for a garden, and what factors might encourage schools without a garden to start one. These    

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questions will generate useful information about existing garden locations, where possibilities may exist for additional school gardens and identify factors that would encourage new school gardens. The three elementary schools where I conducted the survey in April and May 2009 each have one or more gardens the schools use for educational purposes. The survey responses to these questions can help KCFFI understand how the Initiative might best support existing gardening programs, facilitate additional school gardens at schools that would like to start one and opportunities for KCFFI to support sustainable use of school gardens in education.

On a broader scale, the KCFFI may also be able to identify trends or examples of school garden use that the Initiative could use to encourage the Seattle and Highline school districts to adopt district policies regarding school gardens. A clear district policy on school gardens could expand opportunities for gardens at schools. One area for further research is how to ensure school gardens are supported year round. KCFFI may be able to collaborate with schools to develop and implement strategies to maintain school gardens through the summer growing season when students are not in school.

Physical Education Washington state policies and standards direct district-level development of physical education (PE) policies and programs. The Washington OSPI describes the broad context and purpose of its PE policies: “An understanding of good health and fitness concepts and practices is essential for all students. Teaching our students good health and safety principles can lead to a lifetime of healthy practices, resulting in more productive, active, and successful lives. The Health and Fitness Standards establish the concepts and skills necessary for safe and healthy living, and in turn, for successful learning” (Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction n.d.).

OSPI defines physical education as “a planned, sequential program of curricula and instruction that helps students develop the knowledge, attitudes, motor skills, self    

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management skills, and confidence needed to adopt and maintain physically active and healthy lifestyles” (Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction 2009 6). OSPI differentiates between PE and physical activity, describing physical education as a curriculum and physical activity as the application of what students learn in PE classes (Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction 2009 7-8).

OSPI Health and Fitness Standards include the following four Essential Academic Learning Requirements (EALR) 16 , two for health education and two for fitness education, which are the broad skills and knowledge the state expects students to learn throughout K-12 education (Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction 2009 11-12): •

The student acquires the knowledge and skills necessary to maintain an active life: Movement, physical fitness, and nutrition.

•

The student acquires the knowledge and skills necessary to maintain a healthy life: Recognizes dimensions of health, recognizes stages of growth and development, reduces health risks, and lives safely.

•

The student analyzes and evaluates the impact of real-life influences on health.

•

The student effectively analyzes personal information to develop individualized health and fitness plans.

The state Health and Fitness Standards include more specific components, benchmarks and grade-level expectations for each of the four EALRs (see References for reference information). The grade-level expectations are based on input from teams of practicing health and fitness educators from around the state. OSPI does not require districts to follow the grade-level expectations; rather, they are suggested guidelines districts can                                                              16

EALRs "articulate the State’s expectations and learning standards." (OSPI 2009). To assess whether students have achieved these EALRs, the state developed health and fitness-related Classroom Based Assessments (CBA) that districts use as part of the state's educational assessment program, known as the Washington Assessment for Student Learning (WASL),

   

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follow as they develop their own health and fitness curriculum (Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction 2009).

In addition to these Health and Fitness Standards, the Washington state basic education law includes goals for school districts with regard to opportunities they provide to students to learn essential knowledge and skills. Among these are knowledge and skills needed to know and apply several core concepts and principles, including health and fitness (Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction 2009 4-5) State law requires public school students in grades 1-8 to receive PE instruction 17 (Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction 2009). State regulations specify that students in grades 1-8 should receive an average of 100 minutes per week each year of PE instruction, plus a one credit course in PE for each year in grades 9-12 (Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction 2009 5). State regulations also state that recess is intended to give students unstructured play time and cannot be used to meet this 100 minute per week average instruction time requirement. The KCFFI school survey asks about the amount of time students have for PE each school year and recess time each day.

Recess The National Association for Sport and Physical Education recommends all elementary school students have at least one 20-minute recess each day (Natl. Assoc. for Sport and Physical Education 2006). The KCFFI school survey asks how many minutes of recess students have each day and whether the time is structured or free play time. The survey

                                                             17

State law requires PE with the following exceptions for grades 1-8: “That individual pupils or students may be excused on account of physical disability, religious belief, or participation in directed athletics.” And for high school “That individual students may be excused from participating in physical education otherwise required under this section on account of physical disability, employment, or religious belief, or because of participation in directed athletics or military science and tactics or for other good cause.”

   

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also asks whether recess is before or after lunch. Many districts around the country are starting to have recess before lunch.

Information about the benefits of recess before lunch is primarily anecdotal. Few published studies confirm the positive effects of recess before lunch. A 1996 study of children in grades 1-3, however, found less food waste when recess was scheduled before lunch. The author concluded "When recess is scheduled before lunch, children come to lunch ready to eat and are less distracted. Children pay attention, achieve more, and have a more positive school experience when they are not hungry. ... In summary, our data indicate that children may perform better in school when recess is scheduled before lunch" (Getlinger, Laughlin et al. 1996 907). A pilot study of recess before lunch at four schools in Montana showed the average amount of food and beverage waste per student decreased. The Montana Team Nutrition office conducted the pilot at two K-2 schools, one K-8 school and one 5-8 grade middle school. Although the small sample size did not allow for a formal statistical measure, the Montana pilot study data "appear to show an overall decrease in average food and beverage waste after implementation of a RBL [recess before lunch] policy (Montana OPI 2003 28).

The Seattle district’s breakfast and lunch procedure encourages, but does not require, recess before lunch (Seattle Public Schools 2004). The KCFFI school survey asks whether recess is before lunch to better understand the extent to which schools in the focus communities are scheduling recess before lunch. Two of the three schools I surveyed in April and May 2009 have recently scheduled recess before lunch. KCFFI leaders should note the answers to this survey question to see whether other schools have recess before lunch. If the KCFFI leaders decide this is a potential strategy to support, they may want to follow up with schools that have already scheduled recess before lunch to identify barriers they encountered, reaction from students, teachers and staff, and lessons learned regarding impact on student eating habits and classroom behavior.    

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Community Access to School Recreation Facilities Schools have a range of facilities for PE and recess, including fields, indoor gymnasiums and playgrounds. The KCFFI school survey includes questions about the types of facilities that exist at schools in the focus communities. This basic inventory will help the Initiative leaders better understand what facilities exist throughout the focus community for children and youth in addition to community facilities such as parks. The survey also asks whether community members have access to these school recreation facilities in the evenings, on weekends or at other times when school is not in session. The survey also includes a question about joint use agreements with organizations or agencies that use school recreation facilities for sports programs.

Seattle Public Schools and Highline Public Schools have adopted policies and procedures that govern community use of school facilities. Seattle Public Schools has seven policies in the category of “Community Use of School Facilities,” including: Joint Use of School Facilities policy, Short Term Lease of School District Facilities policy, Joint Use Agreement policy, Priorities for School And community After-Hours Use in Operating School Facilities policy, Community Use of School District Facilities policy, Use of School Facilities by Religious Groups policy, and Community Use of Memorial Stadium policy (Seattle Public Schools 2007). All are available on the school district web site (see References).

The Seattle Public Schools policy for community use of school facilities states that “operating school facilities will first be used to support the needs of that school’s programs. After those program needs are met, the Seattle Parks Department will have priority use for its supervised program. Childcare will have next priority. Finally, school facilities shall be made available for other occasional community uses” (Seattle Public Schools 1999). The related procedures outline specific guidelines that govern “occasional use of space within an operating school building beyond the regular school day at fair rental rates,” including use for non-school-related activities (Seattle Public Schools    

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1999). The district has additional procedures for short-term use of surplus space within operating school facilities (Seattle Public Schools 2001).

The Highline Public Schools policy states “The board believes that public schools are owned and operated by and for its patrons. Therefore, the board encourages adult directed community groups in the Highline School district to use school facilities for the purpose of education, recreation and entertainment“ (Highline Public Schools 1983 1). For rental rate purposes, the policy also defines the following five categories of groups that may use school facilities: non-profit, non-commercial, non-sectarian, Highline District community, adult directed student and employee organizations; special interest community groups; adult recreational groups; commercial enterprises; and revenueraising events (Highline Public Schools 1983). The related procedure document describes the rental and application process, and outlines the rules for use of gymnasiums, elementary school playground and athletic areas (Highline Public Schools 1983).

School survey results could be combined with the community facilities data in the 2008 Food for Thought report from UW to give a more detailed picture of the types and locations of recreation facilities that exist and are open to the community. KCFFI may want to discuss with school administrators ways to expand access to facilities at schools in areas of the KCFFI focus communities where similar community facilities are not accessible.

Active Transportation The phrase active transportation refers to the use of any human-powered travel mode, but is often used to refer to biking or walking (Rails-to-Trails Conservancy 2008; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation 2008; Public Health Agency of Canada n.d.; U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention n.d.). The Seattle and Highline transportation policies discuss bus service and do not include information about active transportation modes (Highline Public Schools 1985; Seattle Public Schools 1996).    

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To learn more about active transportation to and from schools, the KCFFI school survey includes questions about facilities such as bicycle racks that support active transportation and another question about the percentage of students who walk, ride a bicycle or use other active modes of transportation. The survey also asks about existing programs that encourage active transportation and interest in ways to start and implement such programs. These questions will generate information that can help the Initiative better understand the extent to which students incorporate physical activity in their transportation to and from school, and interest among schools in ways to encourage active transportation.

The 2008 Food for Thought report includes a more extensive explanation of neighborhood walkability and the methodology the UW Urban Form Lab used to define neighborhood walkability in its research about walkability in King County (Moudon, Lee et al. 2006; University of Washington 2008). While the UFL research gives insight into the average walkability (i.e. the likelihood that an individual will walk in a given neighborhood), the research may be less helpful with regard to schools and active transportation because the self-reported data in the UFL walkability methodology are based on a telephone survey of adults, not children, which may affect the measure of walkability as it applies to students walking to or from schools in the KCFFI focus communities.

The school survey also includes an observation of the sidewalk and crosswalk conditions around schools. The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and the King County Department of Transportation plan, design, build, and maintain the streets and sidewalks and install traffic signals and crossing signs in Seattle and King County, respectively (King County Dept. of Transportation n.d.; Seattle Dept. of Transportation n.d.).

   

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Safe Routes to School Program Congress enacted federal transportation legislation in 2005 that created the federal aid program called Safe Routes to School (SRTS). This law authorizes a federal program to provide federal funding to state departments of transportation, which establish processes and policies for local SRTS programs (U.S. Dept. of Transportation n.d.). Some local programs had already started to address biking and walking to school, but this law brought the topic to the national level. The purposes of the federal SRTS program are: •

enable and encourage children, including those with disabilities, to walk and bicycle to school,

•

make bicycling and walking to school a safer and more appealing transportation alternative, thereby encouraging a healthy and active lifestyle from an early age; and

•

facilitate the planning, development, and implementation of projects and activities that will improve safety and reduce traffic, fuel consumption, and air pollution in the vicinity (approximately 2 miles) of primary and middle schools (Grades K-8) (U.S. Dept. of Transportation n.d.).

The U.S. Department of Transportation describes SRTS as a program that “empowers communities to make walking and bicycling to school a safe and routine activity once again” through a range of projects, from crosswalks and other physical infrastructure improvements to programs that encourage children to bike and walk to school (U.S. Dept. of Transportation n.d.).

In the state of Washington, the Legislature enacted a bill in 2005 that directed the state transportation agency, Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT), to fund local projects proposed by governmental entities (Washington Legislature 2005). The Washington SRTS program funds projects that address the “four Es”: engineering, education and encouragement, and enforcement of traffic laws (Washington Dept. of

   

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Transportation n.d.). 18 Applications for the next round of WSDOT are likely to be due in spring 2010 (Claybrooke 2009).

In addition, the state gave funding to Feet First, a Seattle-based walking advocacy organization, and the Bicycle Alliance of Washington, a statewide bicycling advocacy organization, to create the Center for Safe Routes to School in Washington State which is an additional resource to schools or other entities interested in starting an SRTS program. SRTS programs are typically at elementary schools. Programs at high schools are less common (Cole 2009).

Many different types of projects meet the criteria for the WSDOT SRTS program, which focuses on the “four Es” of bicycle and pedestrian safety: engineering, education, encouragement, and enforcement. Education and encouragement strategies include creating a walking school bus (a group of children who walk to school together with an adult following a structured schedule and route) or a bicycle train (a variation of a walking school bus), distributing educational materials about biking and walking, using educational curricula in school, field trips about pedestrian safety, implementing events and activities that educate and encourage children about walking or biking (e.g. school assemblies, bicycle rodeos, walk and bike to school day, and walk or bike audits.) Engineering improvements that can be part of an SRTS program include sidewalk and crossing improvements, traffic calming and other speed reduction strategies, on-street facilities for bicycles, off-street facilities for bicycles and pedestrians, and secure bicycle parking facilities. Enforcement projects include establishing an adult and/or student                                                              18

Many transportation agencies, including the Federal Highway Administration and state and local agencies, transportation planners, and advocacy organizations refer to the “four Es” as an integrated way to frame strategies to improve safety for bicyclists and pedestrians. Engineering is about physical improvements to facilities for bicyclists, pedestrians and drivers that will reduce collisions and improve safety, education is about teaching safety skills and the environmental and personal health benefits of biking and walking, encouragement, which is related to education and is about strategies to generating interest in biking and walking, and enforcement is about implementing traffic laws More information is available from the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center’s SRTS guide, which is online at http://www.saferoutesinfo.org/guide/index.cfm.

   

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crossing guard program at school or implementing a neighborhood watch program (Washington Dept. of Transportation n.d.).

KCFFI may want to consult the three schools in the focus communities that have experience implementing an SRTS program: Sanislo Elementary School, West Seattle Elementary School and Denny Middle School. These three schools collaborated with Feet First in spring 2006 on an SRTS program called the Go! Program. The Go! Program objective was to increase the percentage of students walking to 25% school-wide, increase carpooling and decrease the percentage of students who get to school by car using a strategy that included raising awareness and excitement about biking and walking among students and including parents in the program design to ensure appropriateness (Carlson, Gruen et al. 2009 6). The Go! Program included a range of activities that addressed engineering, education and encouragement, and enforcement. Table 5 below shows the activities that were part of this program at different points between summer 2007 and 2009. (Not all activities were implemented the entire time at all schools.)

Table 6. Activities to encourage biking and walking at three focus community schools.

Engineering:

Education and Encouragement:

West Seattle Elementary (summer 2007-2009) • Walk to school pedestrian audit with school and community members to identify and rank engineering needs. • A parent motivated by Family Health and Safety Night and Feet First outreach testified with community members at a pedestrian safety meeting, which led to the creation of a crosswalk. • Bicycle education, racks and equipment. Feet First trainings for school staff, parent phone calls and document translation in preparation for Family Health and Safety Night, which included presentation and discussion groups with 45 parents and community members. • Feet First conducted a month-long Safe Routes to School Walking Fridays program, which included organizing walking groups and providing incentives such as t-shirts from a  

 

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• • Enforcement:

• •

Engineering:

• • • • •

Education and Encouragement:

•

• • •

Enforcement:

•

Engineering:

•

student design contest. Parent presentations and volunteer outreach by Feet First. “Neighborhoods on Foot” walking map of West Seattle distributed to all students. Walk to school brochure distributed to parents. Education & Encouragement: There may be funding for additional student pedestrian safety training. Relocation of a crossing guard to a critical intersection, but loss of a second crossing guard to illness. Emphasis patrols, speed reader boards and other enforcement services. Sanislo Elementary School Walk to school pedestrian audit with school and community members to identify and rank engineering needs. Buses rerouted to reduce congestion and improve safety. Handmade “no parking” signs across from new sidewalk to discourage illicit crossing, which encourages parking further from school and walking. Remaining funding will be used to install a new sidewalk for one block along one route to school where children are currently walking on the side of the road. Sidewalk improvements, lighting and other upgrades to a staircase that connects the school to a major arterial funded by the City of Seattle. Feet First presentations and communication with parent groups on walking as well as bus use and carpooling. One day walk to school kick-off event and ongoing self organized walk to school program in which students and family members met along walking routes and filled out logs to record their walking, biking, or bus trips to and from school. “Neighborhoods on Foot” walking map of West Seattle distributed to all students. Student pedestrian safety training, newsletter articles, encouragement game for students, and walk to school event with the mayor of Seattle. There may be funding for additional encouragement similar to the program completed the previous spring at West Seattle Elementary. Emphasis patrols, speed reader boards, and other enforcement services. Denny Middle School Walk to school pedestrian audit with school and community  

 

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members to identify and rank engineering needs. • Deluxe crosswalk improvement with warning sign built between a major commercial area and both Denny Middle School and Chief Sealth High Schools. This is a common walk route and was a priority for Denny’s principal. Education and • Feet First presentation to PTA and participation in several Encouragement: community meetings about pedestrian issues in the school neighborhood. • “Neighborhoods on Foot” walking map of West Seattle distributed to all students. Enforcement: • Emphasis patrols, speed reader boards, and other enforcement services. Source: (Carlson, Gruen et al. 2009)  

A 2009 evaluation of the Go! Program described the results and lessons learned from the Go! Program. Using a combination of car counts, a parent survey and a classroom poll to evaluate the impact of the program, evaluators found that results "suggest that congestion declined slightly during six months of the Go! Program at all participating schools. These initial results indicate that a program that focuses on education and encouragement over a sustained period of time, in combination with traffic enforcement and improvements to pedestrian facilities, helps reduce car congestion" (Carlson, Gruen et al. 2009 12). Regarding the possibility to replicate a similar program elsewhere, the evaluators describe the Go! Program as “a comprehensive portfolio of education and encouragement activities, enforcement techniques, and engineering upgrades that could be replicated at any school that is committed to improving pedestrian and bicycle access. Identifying schools and motivated leaders within schools to take advantage of this toolkit, building a team, and pursuing funding are essential steps” (Carlson, Gruen et al. 2009 12).

Safe Walking Route Maps for Focus Community Schools Seattle Public Schools and Highline Public Schools each offer safe walking route maps on their district web sites (Seattle Public Schools 2008; Highline Public Schools n.d.) Below are two examples of safe walking route maps developed by the two school    

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districts. Highline Public Schools policy directs school principals to develop the maps in consultation with parents and to provide maps to parents (Highline Public Schools 1989). The policy states that criteria to consider for the maps include, but are not limited to "adequate area for walking along roadways, adequate traffic controls to permit pedestrians crossings, volume of traffic, speed of traffic, adult supervision" (Highline Public Schools 1989). Seattle Public Schools does not have a district policy specifically about safe walking routes. Figure 4 below is the walking route map for Roxhill Elementary School and Figure 5 is the safe walking route map for Mount View Elementary School. Seattle Public Schools publishes safe walking route maps for all K-5 schools. The Seattle maps are available online at http://www.seattleschools.org/area/transportation/walk/index.dxml. Highline Public Schools publishes safe walking route maps for all K-12 schools. The Highline maps are available online at http://www.hsd401.org/directory/transportation/SafeWalkingRoutes.htm.

Both the Seattle and Highline school districts promote active transportation to and from school by publishing safe walking route maps described above and pictured below. Promoting biking and walking to and from school reinforces the efforts of schools to teach students about physical fitness. The KCFFI school survey includes questions about school policies and programs to encourage active transportation and asks about student travel mode data that will help the KCFFI understand existing efforts and potential opportunities to support additional efforts to promote active transportation. The three schools in the KCFFI focus communities that have already implemented SRTS programs are additional resources to the KCFFI for information about program successes, challenges and lessons learned.

The SRTS program is one potential model that other schools could replicate to encourage more active transportation, including at higher grade levels where SRTS programs are still rare. Other resources are the representatives of Feet First and the Cascade Bicycle    

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Club Education Foundation who are on the KCFFI Leadership Council and are among the 60 KCFFI Collaborative Partners. Feet First has worked with schools on SRTS and is a co-founder of the Center for Safe Routes to School in Washington State.

   

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Figure 4. Safe walking route map, Roxhill Elementary School. (Source: Seattle Public Schools).    

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Figure 5. Safe walking route map, Mount View Elementary School. (Source: Highline Public Schools).

Summary of Potential Opportunities for KCFFI This section of this paper has covered a range of relevant policies and programs that federal and state governments and school districts develop, fund, and/or regulate that affect school food and fitness environments in the KCFFI focus communities. The survey responses community members will collect using the KCFFI school survey will supplement the policy information here, and help clarify areas where the Initiative leaders may want to focus attention as they develop the Community Action Plan.

   

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Several potential opportunities exist for the KCFFI to influence food and fitness in schools through collaboration with schools or through advocacy for policy changes. I have tried to identify areas where efforts could focus on systems change in the KCFFI focus communities. Understanding these policies and programs – along with the survey results – can help the KCFFI decide where to focus the Initiative’s time and other resources in the Community Action Plan and throughout the implementation of the Initiative. Following are my observations about potential opportunities for KCFFI.

Wellness policies: School districts in Washington adopted wellness policies in 2005. The various elements that comprise each district’s wellness policy vary in both comprehensiveness and use of direct language, according to a March 2009 evaluation (University of Washington 2009). The Highline and Seattle district wellness policies both scored higher on comprehensiveness than strength, which was consistent with all other districts. KCFFI leaders may want to explore how to include more “specific and directive language” throughout the wellness policies in the two districts to improve the strength of the policies. Changing these policies would require a change at the district level. Given how recently the districts adopted these policies, however, it may be a challenge for the Initiative to advocate for changes.

USDA school food programs: Making changes to the federal school food programs could be difficult, but working in coalitions with other interested organizations and with districts may be a way for the Initiative to influence changes in the law if the Initiative feels changes are needed. Changing the guidelines or requirements for these programs would require changes to federal law. Congress is expected to reauthorize the child nutrition law in 2009. Locally, KCFFI may have difficulty influencing the specific foods included in the federally-reimbursed school food programs because the two districts purchase foods for all their schools as part of co-operative that includes several school districts in the region to purchase school foods.    

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Offering fresh fruits and vegetables as snacks in schools: Both the federal government and Washington state government have programs to increase access to fresh fruits and vegetables for snacks in schools. The federal program started in 2002 and now funds programs at 25 schools nationwide, including one school in the Seattle district and one in the Highline district. In addition, the Washington Legislature enacted the Local FarmsHealthy Kids Act in 2008, which includes a similar program at 25 schools, including one in Seattle and one in Highline. No schools in the KCFFI focus communities received federal FFVP grants in 2008-2009 but one elementary school in the KCFFI focus communities, Beverly Park Elementary, is an FFVP state grant recipient. This school has experience with this program and may be a source of information about how KCFFI could help other schools implement such a program.

Since the Highline and Seattle districts each have adopted wellness policies, the federal and state governments have fresh fruit and vegetable programs, and the KCFFI is a collaborative effort, the KCFFI may be an effective partner to support or expand fresh fruit and vegetable snack programs in other KCFFI focus community schools. The KCFFI school survey includes a question about interest in providing fresh fruits and vegetables for snacks in schools to better understand the level of interest among KCFFI focus community schools in incorporating such a program. All three individuals at the three schools I surveyed in April and May 2009 responded that they are interested in providing free fruits and vegetables as snacks in their schools.

Summer food service program: Additional research is needed to determine how KCFFI could collaborate with the City of Seattle and the two school districts to identify potential Summer Food Service Program sites to ensure eligible students throughout the KCFFI focus communities can easily access a program site.

Competitive foods: Since schools decide which, if any, competitive foods will be available; this may be an area for the KCFFI to collaborate with school administrators to    

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influence healthy food choices. The KCFFI school survey includes questions about the availability of vending machines students can access, vending machine contents, use of vending machine revenue, foods used as part of fundraising activities, competitive foods in the lunchroom and the classroom, and advertising in the school. Only one of the three schools I surveyed in April and May 2009 sells a competitive food item (yogurt). Looking at the responses to these survey questions after all 16 schools are surveyed will give the KCFFI a better understanding of the extent of competitive foods available in schools, what items they sell and whether opportunities exist for the KCFFI to work with schools to encourage healthy competitive foods.

Food pricing: Given that the USDA sets reimbursement levels for the school food programs, KCFFI may want to focus instead on competitive food pricing if schools sell competitive foods that the Initiative wants to discourage.

Food environment around schools: This may be an area for additional research to identify where students go off campus to eat, what foods are available and whether opportunities exist for the KCFFI to encourage access to healthy foods at those locations. The 2008 UW Food for Thought report includes a neighborhood-level assessment of the built environment in the KCFFI focus communities, including a map and analysis of the types and locations of food sources in the neighborhoods that would be a useful resource for such research. The Initiative may also want to collaborate with schools to find ways to encourage students to stay on campus rather than leaving campus during the school day.

School gardens: The KCFFI school survey includes questions about whether the school has a garden, garden size, how the garden is used, whether the site is permanently set aside for a garden, and what factors might encourage schools without a garden to start one. These questions will generate useful information about existing garden locations, where possibilities may exist for additional school gardens and identify factors that would encourage new school gardens. The three elementary schools where I conducted the    

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survey in April and May 2009 each have one or more gardens the schools use for educational purposes. The responses to these survey questions can help KCFFI understand how the Initiative might best support existing gardening programs, facilitate additional school gardens at schools that would like to start one and opportunities for KCFFI to support sustainable use of school gardens in education.

On a broader scale, the KCFFI may also be able to identify trends or examples of school garden use that the Initiative could use to encourage the Seattle and Highline school districts to adopt district policies regarding school gardens. A clear district policy on school gardens could expand opportunities for gardens at schools. One area for further research is how to ensure school gardens are supported year round. KCFFI may be able to collaborate with schools to develop and implement strategies to maintain school gardens through the summer growing season when students are not in school.

Recess before lunch: The KCFFI school survey asks whether recess is before lunch to better understand the extent to which schools in the focus communities are scheduling recess before lunch. Two of the three schools I surveyed in April and May 2009 have recently scheduled recess before lunch. Neither the Seattle nor Highline school district has a policy that requires recess before lunch, although the Seattle district encourages it. If the KCFFI leaders decide this is a strategy to support, they may want to follow up with schools that have already scheduled recess before lunch to identify barriers they encountered, reaction from students, teachers and staff, and lessons learned regarding impact on student eating habits and classroom behavior.

Community access to school facilities for physical fitness and recreation: School survey responses could be combined with the community facilities data in the 2008 Food for Thought report from UW to give a more detailed picture of the types and locations of recreation facilities that exist and are open to the community. Both the Seattle and Highline districts have policies and procedures related to community use of school    

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facilities. KCFFI may want to discuss with school administrators ways to expand access to facilities at schools in areas of the KCFFI focus communities where similar community facilities are not accessible.

Active transportation: The Seattle and Highline school districts promote active transportation to and from school by publishing safe walking route maps. Promoting biking and walking to and from school reinforces the efforts of schools to teach students about physical fitness. The KCFFI school survey includes questions about school policies and programs to encourage active transportation and asks about student travel mode data that will help the KCFFI understand existing efforts and potential opportunities to support additional efforts to promote active transportation. The three schools in the KCFFI focus communities that have already implemented Safe Routes to School (SRTS) programs are additional resources to the KCFFI for information about program successes, challenges and lessons learned.

The SRTS program is one potential model that other schools could replicate to encourage more active transportation, including at higher grade levels where SRTS programs are still rare. Other resources are the representatives of Feet First and the Cascade Bicycle Club Education Foundation who are on the KCFFI Leadership Council and are among the 60 KCFFI Collaborative Partners. Feet First has worked with schools on SRTS and is a co-founder of the Center for Safe Routes to School in Washington State.

   

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CONCLUSION

The purpose of this professional project is to provide the KCFFI Co-conveners, focus community lead organizations, and the Leadership Council a survey tool that can be used at schools, a way to collect the survey results, training to individuals interested in conducting the survey, and a compendium of relevant policies set by agencies outside the schools that affect the food and fitness environments in schools. Like the survey, the policy section of this paper is intended to give Initiative leaders a snapshot of the existing conditions and context within which schools operate with regard to food and fitness. This paper and the school survey will provide KCFFI leaders information about schools they can use as they develop the KCFFI Community Action Plan this summer.

In general, I think this document is unique but my methodology is transferrable to studies of school food and fitness environments in other communities. I was unable to find a similar document that includes information about federal, state and Seattle and Highline school district policies that affect the schools in the KCFFI focus communities. Nor did a survey tool exist that specifically addresses the range of topics of interest to the KCFFI. In short, this document and the survey are unique in their relevance to this particular Initiative, but I believe the methodology I used could be replicated elsewhere to produce a similar paper about school food and fitness environments in other communities.

Lessons Learned My experience working with the KCFFI Co-conveners, assessment team and other Initiative participants to develop the survey resulted in a survey that covers a wide range of topics of interest to the Initiative. The Initiative participants who conduct the survey will collect useful information for the KCFFI Community Action Plan development process this summer. This professional project will also give the Initiative a process and survey that participants can use in the future to evaluate the impact of the Initiative with    

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regard to improving the environments in which school-age residents of the focus communities learn and play.

In addition to the survey itself, the Initiative will benefit from relationships with local schools in the focus communities that will be valuable during the Initiative implementation and beyond. Participants who have never conducted a survey will gain skills in this process that they can use for future survey work as part of the Initiative or in other endeavors. In addition, while the survey I developed is not intended to be a monitoring tool, the process of conducting the survey does offer an opportunity to learn about the extent to which policies are being implemented. This provides some measure of accountability because community members are asking questions related to the implementation of specific policies and programs. This survey is just one way to gather information about school environments. Future surveys could include more qualitative surveys of parents and/or teachers to gain additional perspectives on food and fitness in schools.

Reflecting on my experience developing and conducting this survey, my observations about the process and future use of the survey fall into three categories: survey development, survey format and survey audience.

Survey development: My effort to address so many different topics in a survey that could be conducted in approximately 30-45 minutes at each school may have limited my ability to follow up on some questions where additional information might be useful to the Initiative. I believe this survey addresses the topics of interest to the Initiative when I started this project and will provide good baseline information this year, but input from assessment team members and feedback from community members who conduct the surveys would be helpful before conducting other surveys in future years to determine whether to use the same format and same set of questions or focus only on topics that are the focus of the Initiative implementation.    

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One of the tradeoffs of including so many topics is that I could include only a few questions about each topic, sometimes only one question. While this will provide information on a broad range of topics, Initiative participants may need to follow up with schools on specific issues as they have a clearer idea of the focus of the Community Action Plan.

For future surveys, I would make a couple changes with regard to the draft survey review. I tried to include in the survey only questions about site-specific characteristics of schools. I interviewed school district staff about areas of district policy where I had questions following my research but I should also have included someone from each school district among the reviewers as I drafted the survey as well. Their review would have been useful because they could easily identify specific questions that were not necessary because they address an issue that is the same at every school or is determined by the district or state (e.g. meal prices, participation in the school lunch program, amount of time spent in PE). In addition, I think it would have been helpful to ask some students to review the draft survey as well because they are more familiar with the existing conditions in schools.

Survey format: I heard from assessment team members while revising the survey questions that I would probably have limited time to meet with school principals, so I made every effort to limit the number of open-ended questions and the total number of questions. Adding other questions or more open-ended questions in future surveys would likely require reducing the topics covered or require more time to conduct the survey. I made minor changes to some questions following my interviews with three schools to make the questions easier to read and to remove jargon such as “active transportation” from the survey. If the Initiative determines more open-ended questions should be added to future surveys, I suggest having two individuals attend each interview, to allow one person to ask the questions and the other to take notes.    

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All three individuals I met with were able to answer all the questions in the survey, which made the survey administration easier than I expected. Based on my experience, I feel creating a separate food survey and fitness survey is unnecessary. For future surveys, however, I would consider using a different survey for each school level to make the survey more clear for the interviewer. Most of the questions apply to all school levels, but some questions are only for elementary schools and a few are only for high schools. To address this, I noted in the survey which questions are specifically for high schools, but a separate survey document for elementary schools and another for middle and high schools might be more helpful.

Survey audience: I met with the principal at two of the three schools and with the Physical Education teacher at the third school when I conducted the survey in April and May 2009. One topic that came up during conversations with assessment team members and community lead organizations was whether I would also conduct the survey with teachers, parents and students. Based on early conversations with the Project Director, we determined the focus group for this survey would be principals or other school administrators. The reason for this was that this survey is intended to gather primarily quantitative information about school characteristics rather than a more qualitative or opinion survey about school food and fitness. Such a qualitative survey could generate useful information for the Initiative but was outside the scope of my project. In addition, we decided school principals would be the most likely individual in the school to be able to answer many, if not all, the survey questions and would know which other school staff member I should contact if I needed to follow up on specific questions.

Potential Opportunities The combination of information about federal, state and school district policies and programs described in the previous section and the site-specific information from the KCFFI school survey will help the reader understand why school environments are the    

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way they are, and help clarify areas where the Initiative leaders may want to focus attention during the planning process. As described at the end of the previous section, several potential opportunities exist for the KCFFI to encourage healthy eating and physical activity among the student-age population in the KCFFI focus communities.

These potential opportunities vary in terms of the scope of work needed to have an impact depending on the particular policy or program. Changing the federal guidelines or structure of the federally-reimbursed school food programs, for example, would require considerable advocacy work to change federal law or regulation. Such efforts may be possible through work in coalitions that focus on such policy changes at the federal level, for example, but local policy changes may result in more immediate systems change during the Initiative implementation period.

One example is the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program, which is already established at the federal and state levels. Several schools have experience with SRTS programs and could serve as a resource to the KCFFI. The school districts support active transportation by providing safe walking route maps, and, based on my initial survey of three schools, this is an area of interest among KCFFI focus community schools. At least three KCFFI focus community schools have experience implementing such a program.

Similarly, programs to offer fresh fruits and vegetables as snacks in schools may be an area where a program exists, one school in the focus communities has a grant to implement a program (and therefore some experience the Initiative could draw from) and interest exists among school administrators, based on my initial survey of three elementary schools. In these and other cases, the responses to the KCFFI school survey will help illuminate areas where interest and/or examples of successful implementation already exist.

   

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In conclusion, I believe the information presented here about the complex layers of federal, state and district policies, regulations, recommendations and requirements - along with the school survey results - will give the KCFFI a better sense of potential opportunities to work with schools to improve the food and fitness environments of students in the focus communities. Knowing which elements of the school food and fitness environments are determined by existing policies and using the survey to understand the site-specific characteristics of schools can help the Initiative identify where to focus its resources to have the greatest impact in the coming years.

   

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REFERENCES Arnstein, S. R. (1969). "A Ladder of Citizen Participation." JAIP 35(No. 4): 216-224. Beck, K. (2009). Personal communication (Healthy Youth Survey). D. Kramer. Seattle. Berke, P., D. R. Godschalk, et al. (2006). Urban Land Use Planning, Univ. of Illinois Press. Burby, R. J. (2003). "Making Plans that Matter: Citizen Involvement and Government Action." Journal of the American Planning Association 69(1): 33 - 49. Carlson, D., D. Gruen, et al. (2009). Reducing Auto Congestion Around Schools: Transportation Demand Strategies for Schools Phase II Report. Seattle. Center for Cultural Understanding and Change. (n.d.). "Introduction: Participatory Action Research (PAR)." Retrieved May 16, 2009, from http://www.fieldmuseum.org/par/introduction.html. Claybrooke, C. (2009). Personal communication (SRTS grants). D. Kramer. Seattle. Cole, J. (2009). Personal communication (SRTS). D. Kramer. Seattle. Coulter, S. (2008). Personal communication. D. Kramer. Seattle. Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association. (n.d.). "What is the Delridge Community?" Retrieved Aug. 17, 2008, from http://www.dnda.org/work/plan.html. Getlinger, M. J., C. Laughlin, et al. (1996). "Food Waste is Rediced When ElementarySchool Children Have Recess Before Lunch." Journal of the American Dietetic Association 96(9): 906-907. Graham, H., D. L. Beall, et al. (2005). "Use of School Gardens in Academic Instruction." Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior 37(3): 147-151. Highline Public Schools (1983). Use of School Facilities Policy. Burien, HPS. Highline Public Schools (1983). Use of School Facilities Procedure. Burien, HPS. Highline Public Schools (1985). Food services policy. Burien, HPS. Highline Public Schools (1985). Transportation Policy. Burien, HPS. Highline Public Schools (1985). Vending machines policy. Burien, HPS. Highline Public Schools (1989). Safe walking routes policy. Burien, HPS. Highline Public Schools (1999). Closed campus policy. Burien, HPS. Highline Public Schools (2005). Nutrition and Physical Fitness Policy. Burien (Wash.), HSD. Highline Public Schools (n.d.). Highline Public Schools Nutrition Standards. Burien, HPS. Highline Public Schools. (n.d.). "Highline Public Schools Wellness Policy." Retrieved April 21, 2009, from http://www.hsd401.org/directory/nutrition/wellnesspolicy.htm. Highline Public Schools. (n.d.). "Nutrition Education in the Classroom." Retrieved May 1, 2009, from http://www.hsd401.org/directory/nutrition/nutritioneducation.htm. Highline Public Schools. (n.d.). "Safe Walking Route to School." Retrieved April 21, 2009, from http://www.hsd401.org/directory/transportation/safewalkingroutes.htm    

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Highline Public Schools. (n.d.). "School board." Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://www.hsd401.org/ourdistrict/board/. Hoch, C. J. (2000). Making Plans. The Practice of Local Government Planning. C. J. Hoch. Washington, D.C., ICMA: 19-39. KCFFI. (2007). "Focus Communities Request for Qualifications." Retrieved May 22, 2009, from http://king.wsu.edu/foodandfarms/documents/KCFFISiteSelectionRFQFinal1231 07.pdf. KCFFI. (2008). "Collaborative Partners." Retrieved April 7, 2009, from http://king.wsu.edu/foodandfarms/KCFFICollaborative.html. KCFFI. (2008). "KCFFI Leadership Council." Retrieved April 7, 2009, from http://king.wsu.edu/foodandfarms/KCFFILeadership.html. KCFFI. (2008). "King County Food and Fitness Initiative." Retrieved April 7, 2009, from http://www.kcffi.org. KCFFI (2008). King County Food and Fitness Initiative Presentation to Seattle City Council. Seattle, KCFFI. KCFFI (2009). DRAFT Summary of Strategies for Consideration with Examples of Tactics. Seattle, KCFFI. King County Dept. of Transportation. (n.d.). "About Us." Retrieved May 24, 2009, from http://www.kingcounty.gov/transportation/kcdot/AboutUs.aspx. Kovacs, T. (2009). Personal communication. D. Kramer. Olympia. Kretzmann, J. P., J. L. McKnight, et al. (1993). Building communities from the inside out: a path toward finding and mobilizing a community's assets. Evanston, Ill., Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, Northwestern University. Krieger, J., E. MacDougall, et al. (2009). DRAFT Summary of strategies for consideration with examples of tactics. Seattle. Maman, B. (2009). HSD approval of project protocol. D. Kramer. Seattle. Martz, W. A. (1995). Report Number 455: Neighborhood-Based Planning. Planning Advisory Service. Chicago. McAleese, J. D. and L. L. Rankin (2007). "Garden-Based Nutrition Education Affects Fruit and Vegetable Consumption in Sixth-Grade Adolescents." Journal of the American Dietetic Association 107(4): 662-665. Minkler, M. (2000). "Using Participatory Action Research to Build Healthy Communities." Public Health Reports 115(2-3): 191-197. Montana OPI (2003). Pilot Project Report. Helena, Montana OPI. Moudon, A. V., C. Lee, et al. (2006). "Operational Definitions of Walkable Neighborhood: Theoretical and Empirical Insights." Journal of Physical Activity & Health 3: S99-S117. Natl. Assoc. for Sport and Physical Education (2006). Recess for Elementary School Students. Reston, VA. Neal, C. (2009). Personal communication (HPS food service). D. Kramer. Seattle. Neal, C. (2009). Personal communication (HPS Nutrition Services). D. Kramer. Seattle.    

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Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. (2008). "Washington State Report Card." Retrieved April 14, 2009, from http://reportcard.ospi.k12.wa.us/summary.aspx?year=2007-08. Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. (n.d.). "Health Fitness." Retrieved April 24, 2009, from http://www.k12.wa.us/curriculumInstruct/Healthfitness/HealthFitness.aspx. Ozer, E. J. (2007). "The Effects of School Gardens on Students and Schools: Conceptualization and Considerations for Maximizing Healthy Development." Health Education & Behavior 34(6): 846-863. Partners in Action. (2009). "Washington State Fresh Fruit & Vegetable Program." Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://depts.washington.edu/waaction/action/n1/c4.html. Public Health Agency of Canada. (n.d.). "What is Active Transportation?" Retrieved April 22, 2009, from http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/pauuap/fitness/active_trans.htm. Public Health Seattle – King County. (n.d.). "White Center & Boulevard Park Community Data." Retrieved July 14, 2008, from http://www.metrokc.gov/health/datamaps. Rails-to-Trails Conservancy. (2008). "Active Transportation for America." Retrieved May 22, 2009, from http://www.railstotrails.org/whatwedo/trailadvocacy/ATFA/index.html. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. (2008). "Active Transportation to School - Trends in Walking and Biking to School." Retrieved May 17, 2009, from http://www.rwjf.org/files/research/researchhighlight35.4.pdf. Robinson-O'Brien, R., M. Story, et al. (2009). "Impact of Garden-Based Youth Nutrition Intervention Programs: A Review." Journal of the American Dietetic Association 109(2): 273-280. Seattle Dept. of Transportation. (n.d.). "SDOT Divisions." Retrieved May 24, 2009, from http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/sdotdivisions.htm. Seattle Human Services Department. (n.d.). "Summer Food Service Program." Retrieved April 29, 2009, from http://www.seattle.gov/humanservices/children_families/nutrition/summer_food.h tm. Seattle Public Schools (1995). Student access and egress. Seattle, SPS. Seattle Public Schools (1996). Transportation Policy. Seattle, SPS. Seattle Public Schools (1999). Community Use of School District Facilities Procedure. Seattle, SPS. Seattle Public Schools (1999). Priorities for School and Community After-Hours Use in Operating School Facilities. Seattle, SPS. Seattle Public Schools (2001). Short Term Lease of School District Facilities. Seattle, SPS. Seattle Public Schools (2004). Breakfast and Lunch Program Proecdure. Seattle, SPS.    

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Seattle Public Schools (2004). Distribution and Sales of Competitive Foods Procedure. Seattle, SPS. Seattle Public Schools (2004). Drinking Water Quality and Access Policy. Seattle, SPS. Seattle Public Schools (2004). Drinking Water Quality and Access Procedure. Seattle, SPS. Seattle Public Schools (2004). Food Service Policy. Seattle, SPS. Seattle Public Schools. (2005). "School board legal status." Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://www.seattleschools.org/area/policies/b/B50.00.pdf. Seattle Public Schools (2006). Nutrition Education Policy. Seattle, SPS. Seattle Public Schools (2006). Nutrition Education Procedure. Seattle, SPS. Seattle Public Schools. (2007). "Board Policies and Procedures: Community and Government Relations." Retrieved May 19, 2009, from http://www.seattleschools.org/area/policies/e/index.dxml. Seattle Public Schools. (2008). "Transportation." Retrieved April 21, 2009, from http://www.seattleschools.org/area/transportation/walk/index.dxml Sirianni, C. (2007). "Neighborhood Planning as Collaborative Democratic Design: The Case of Seattle." Journal of the American Planning Association 73(4): 373-387. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). "Active transportation to/from school." Retrieved April 22, 2009, from http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/kidswalk/then_and_now.htm. U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (2008). National School Lunch Program Fact Sheet. Washington, D.C., USDA. U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. (2009). "Afterschool Snacks - FAQ." Retrieved April 25, 2009, from http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/afterschool/NSLP_QA.htm. U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. (2009). "School Meals." Retrieved April 25, 2009, from http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/. U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. (2009). "Seamless Summer Option." Retrieved April 29, 2009, from http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/Seamless_Summer.htm. U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (n.d.). Interim Report on the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, Fiscal Year 2007. FNS. Washington, USDA. U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. (n.d.). "Local Wellness Policy Requirements." Retrieved April 23, 2009, from http://www.fns.usda.gov/TN/Healthy/wellness_policyrequirements.html. U.S. Dept. of Transportation. (n.d.). "Safe Routes to School." Retrieved April 22, 2009, from http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/saferoutes/. University of Washington (2006). Visualize Delridge: Planning for the Future of the Neighborhood. Seattle, UW. University of Washington (2007). We Create White Center: Neighborhood Action Plan Seattle, UW. University of Washington (2008). Food for Thought: Groundwork for the King County Food & Fitness Initiative. Seattle, UW.

   

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University of Washington. (2009). "King County School Districts Wellness Policy Assessment." Retrieved May 1, 2009, from http://courses.washington.edu/nutr531/BOH2008/BOH_timeline.htm. UW Human Subjects Division. (2008). "Frequently Asked Questions." Retrieved April 15, 2009, from http://www.washington.edu/research/hsd/faq.php. W.K. Kellogg Foundation (2008). Assessing School Fitness Environments. Battle Creek (Mich.). W.K. Kellogg Foundation. (n.d.). "About the Initiative." Retrieved April 7, 2009, from http://www.wkkf.org/Default.aspx?tabid=90&CID=383&ItemID=5000343&NID =5010343&LanguageID=0. W.K. Kellogg Foundation. (n.d.). "Who We Are." Retrieved April 7, 2009, from http://www.wkkf.org. Washington Dept. of Agriculture. (n.d.). "Washington Grown Fruits and Vegetables Grant Program." Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://agr.wa.gov/marketing/farm2school/wagro.aspx. Washington Dept. of Health. (n.d.). "Healthy Youth Survey." Retrieved April 14, 2009, from https://fortress.wa.gov/doh/hys/. Washington Dept. of Transportation. (n.d.). "Highways and Local Programs: Safe Routes to School." Retrieved April 22, 2009, from http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/localprograms/saferoutes/. Washington Legislature (2004). SB 5436 School district wellness policy legislation. Olympia, Washington Legislature. Washington Legislature (2005). ESSB 6091 Transportation funding legislation. Olympia. Washington Legislature (2008). Local Farms-Healthy Kids Act (2SSB 6483) Final Bill Report. Olympia, Washington Legislature. Washington Legislature (2009). 2009-11 Operating (Including the 2009 Supplemental) Statewide Summary & Agency Detail. Olympia, Senate Ways & Means Committee. Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (2009). Health and Fitness Standards, Essential Academic Learning Requirements: A Recommended Gradeby-Grade Sequence for Grade Level Expectations – Grades K-12. Olympia, OSPI. Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (2009). Washington State Child Nutrition Programs. Olympia, OSPI. Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. (n.d.). "National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs." Retrieved April 25, 2009, from http://www.k12.wa.us/ChildNutrition/NSLSBP.aspx. Washington State School Directors Association. (2004). "School districts offered sample policy on nutrition and fitness." Retrieved April 23, 20091, from http://www.wssda.org/wssda/webforms/en-us/news/2004/20041215_nutrition.asp. Weyer, W. (2009). Personal communication (SPS Nutrition Services). D. Kramer. Seattle. WSU-King County Extension. (2008). "Food Sense CHANGE Schools." Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://king.wsu.edu/nutrition/CHANGEschools.html.    

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WSU-King County Extension. (2008). "Local Farms-Healthy Kids." Retrieved April 29, 2009, from http://king.wsu.edu/foodandfarms/LocalFarmsHealthyKids.html. WSU-King County Extension. (2009). "Food Sense CHANGE." Retrieved May 2, 2009, from http://king.wsu.edu/nutrition/change.htm. Young, B. (2007). Affordable Rentals Vanish As Apartments Go Condo. The Seattle Times. Seattle, Seattle Times Company.

   

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APPENDIX

   

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KCFFI Collaborative Partners, as of May 12, 2008 REACH Coalition Safe Futures Youth Center City of Seattle-Mayor's Office City of Seattle-Department of Neighborhoods City of Seattle-Office of Sustainability & Environment Seattle Chefs Collaborative Seattle Indian Health Board Seattle Tilth Seattle Youth Garden Works Sno-Valley Tilth Solid Ground STEPS to Health King County The Seattle Foundation Transportation Choices Coalition Treeswing University of Washington Center for Obesity Research University of Washington Department of Urban Design and Planning, Urban Form Lab University of Washington Northwest Center for Livable Communities Washington Health Foundation Washington State Dept of Agriculture Small Farm & Direct Marketing Program Washington State Department of Health Washington State University Washington State University Small Farms Program White Center Community Development Assoc. Youth Media Institute YMCA of Greater Seattle

21 Acres Acting Food Policy Council of Seattle and King County Austin Foundation Big Brothers, Big Sisters Cascade Bicycle Club Education Foundation Cascade Harvest Coalition Center for Public Health and Nutrition, University of Washington Childrens Alliance Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center Community Food Security Coalition Community Health Centers of King County Delridge Neighborhoods Development Assoc. FareStart Feet First Food Lifeline Full Circle Farm Futurewise Good Food Strategies Group Health Community Foundation Hmong Farmers Association International District Housing Alliance King County King County 4-H Association King County Agriculture Commission King County Board of Health Mithun Neighborhood Farmers Market Alliance Neighborhood House Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic Pacific Asian Empowerment Program Passages Northwest PCC Natural Markets Puget Sound Regional Council Puget Sound School Gardens Collaborative

   

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KCFFI Leadership Council Members, as of May 11, 2008 Willie Austin, Austin Foundation and Now Is Fitness Center Michelle Bates-Benetua, Solid Ground Baraka Cloyd, Sustainable Urban Farming Institute Lisa Quinn, Feet First Mary Embleton/Mark McIntyre, Cascade Harvest Coalition Mollie Greves, Children's Hospital & Regional Medical Centers Kate Halstead, Sno-Valley Tilth Laura Raymond, Seattle Department of Neighborhoods P-Patch Program and the Food System Enhancement Team Julie Salathe, Cascade Bicycle Club Education Foundation Tyra Sorensen, MITHUN Amy White, YMCA of Greater Seattle Virgil Domaoan, White Center Resident Aviva Furman, Delridge Neighborhood Resident Roxanne Slattery, White Center Resident Bethany Tate, White Center Resident Kimi Martin, White Center Resident Randy Engstrom, Youth Coordinating Agency Representative

   

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KCFFI Assessment Team Members, Affiliation and Focus, as of January 2009 Branden Born, UW, Food/Planning Adam Drewnowski, UW, Food/Planning Brad Gaolach, WSU King County Extension, Agriculture (general) Donna Johnson, UW, Childhood Obesity Jim Krieger, Public Health Seattle – King County, Epi/King County Data Amy Laurent, Public Health Seattle – King County, Epi/ King County Data Erin MacDougall, Public Health Seattle – King County, assessment oversight Brian Saelens, UW, Built Environment/Child Health Anne Vernez Moudon, UW, GIS Doug Collins, WSU, Farming/Agriculture Roxana Chen, Public Health Seattle – King County, Qualitative/Evaluation

   

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KCFFI School Survey Interviewer Instructions King County Food and Fitness Initiative (KCFFI) School Survey Instructions May 1, 2009 Thank you for helping with the King County Food and Fitness Initiative (KCFFI) school survey. The purpose of this survey is to learn about the food and fitness environments in the 15 public elementary, middle and high schools in Delridge and White Center. The KCFFI is conducting the surveys to acquire baseline information about site-specific aspects of schools. While many policies and programs that affect students and schools are established by school districts or the state or federal government, many site-specific programs, policies and characteristics affect food and fitness in a specific school. This survey is intended to help KCFFI understand those things that are site-specific. If you have any questions, please contact Erin MacDougall at Public Health-Seattle & King County at [email protected] or 206-263-8804 or Don Kramer at 206.406.1325 or [email protected]. Who should I contact? Start by calling the school principal and setting up a meeting. The principal will likely be able to answer most, if not all, questions about both food and fitness. The person you interview may not know the answer to a question or may suggest you contact the food/nutrition services director or someone else at the school. That’s okay. One of the instructions at the start of the survey is to ask the person you interview to let you know if there is someone else you should talk with about any of the questions or topics in the survey. I have already interviewed Nutrition Services staff in the Highline and Seattle schools district offices. What do I need to tell them when I call? Tell the principal that you are following up on a letter mailed to all principals in Delridge and White Center on March 10 and emailed to all principals on March 13 about a school survey for the KCFFI. If they did not get the letter or don’t remember it, offer to re-send the letter. (Ask Maggie Anderson at KCFFI to re-send the letter.) Ask if they are familiar with the King County Food and Fitness Initiative. If they are not, briefly describe the Initiative and explain that you are calling to arrange a time to meet with them to conduct a survey about food and fitness in their school. The survey should take approximately 30 minutes. What do I bring to the survey interview? Bring a copy of the survey for you to read and to mark the answers on. Bring an extra copy of the survey in case the person you interview would like a copy.

   

98    How to conduct the survey: Start by writing the school, the name of the person you are interviewing and date in the spaces provided on the survey form. Give the person you interview a copy of the Oral Consent Statement so they can read it as you go over the introductory information on the survey form and let them know the contact information is on that sheet if they have any additional comments after the interview. This introductory information is similar to the information on the Oral Consent Statement. The statement explains how the information will be used, that the information is not confidential, and other items the person should know before you start. It is necessary to read this information and obtain the consent of the person you interview before you start the survey. Read each question and, if there is a checklist answer, read the answers. Mark the person’s answers as you go along and make any additional notes if necessary. Most questions are written so the answer is either Yes or No or a selection from a checklist. A few questions are open ended. One question asks whether the school has a vending machine students can use. If the person you interview answers yes, tell them you would like to see the vending machine after the interview. There is a checklist in the survey where you will then list what is in the machine. The last part of the survey involves walking around the site and describing the sidewalks and crosswalks. Do this after you finish the interview and before you leave the site. There is a space and instructions for this on the last page of the survey. The person you interview does not need to walk with you.

   

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KCFFI School Survey King County Food and Fitness Initiative (KCFFI) School Survey SCHOOL NAME:_____________________________________________________________ DATE:______________________________________________________________________ NAME OF INDIVIDUAL CONDUCTING SURVEY:________________________________ SCHOOL LEVEL (check one): _____elementary _____middle school _____high school [INTERVIEWER: READ THE FOLLOWING TO THE PERSON YOU ARE INTERVIEWING BEFORE STARTING SURVEY - GIVE COPY OF ORAL CONSENT STATEMENT TO THE PERSON YOU ARE INTERVIEWING.] ORAL CONSENT STATEMENT The purpose of this interview is to conduct a school survey to inform the King County Food and Fitness Initiative (KCFFI). The Initiative received a two-and-a-half-year grant in 2006 to create a multi-year action plan with the potential for implementation support. We are one of nine communities chosen to be part of Food & Fitness, a national project of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Food & Fitness believes that together we can advance opportunities for all children and families to thrive, beginning with food and fitness and building from there. The Kellogg Foundation sees this Initiative as a strategy for social change to address healthy eating and physical activity and to move toward social and health equity by supporting families and children. The KCFFI focus communities are Delridge and White Center. The organizations leading the Initiative include Washington State University-King County Extension, Public Health-Seattle & King County, the White Center Community Development Association, the Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association, and the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, and more than 50 collaborative partners committed to improving the places we live, learn, work, and play. This survey is also part of a project that Don Kramer, a graduate student at the University of Washington, is working on for a graduate thesis project. Mr. Kramer’s project is to develop a survey that community members can use to gather information about food and fitness in schools. Community members will then use the information from the survey in the implementation and evaluation process for the multi-year grant. Community members will conduct the survey at schools in Delridge and White Center this spring. •

Your participation in the survey is voluntary and you may decline to answer questions at any time.  

 

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• •

The information will not be confidential. Because the project is intended to give community members participating in the Initiative information about the schools in the neighborhoods, the project report will include specific references to schools and individuals who participate in the survey. The information I collect during our conversation will be incorporated into Mr. Kramer’s thesis document which he will give to the KCFFI leadership organizations mentioned above. The survey should take approximately 30 minutes and includes questions about food services in your school, nutrition education, physical education programs and facilities, and may also involve a brief observation of the school facilities for physical education and activities at your school.

I appreciate your participation in this survey project. If you have any questions or comments after our meeting, feel free to contact Erin MacDougall or Don Kramer. Their contact information is on the copy of this statement I gave you. Do you have any questions before we start? Do you wish to participate in this survey? YES______ NO_______ NAME OF PERSION YOU ARE INTERVIEWING: ___________________________ JOB TITLE:____________________________________________________________ HOW MUCH TIME DO YOU SPEND IN THIS ROLE? ____part-time ____full-time ____other (please explain below)

HOW LONG HAVE YOU WORKED AT THIS SCHOOL? ________Years START of school survey. During this survey, I will ask about characteristics of your school, and food and fitness at this school. If I ask you about something that does not apply to this school or that this school does not do, please indicate that by saying that it is not applicable. If there is someone else on the school staff with whom I should speak about particular topics or questions, please indicate that and I will follow up with them. Please answer the questions based on how you typically do things at this school. Section 1: Food. 1. How much time do students have to eat breakfast and lunch at school each day (excluding time getting to and from the cafeteria)?    

101    Breakfast_________minutes Lunch____________minutes 2. Besides foods offered through the USDA school lunch program, are any other competitive foods available in the cafeteria? YES______ NO_______ If Yes, what kinds?

3. Do cafeteria lunches include salads or salad bar options? YES______ NO_______ SOMETIMES______ Would you like to see one every day? YES______ NO_______ What barriers prevent that from happening?   4. Would you be interested in providing free fruits and vegetables for snacks in the school? YES______ NO_______ 5. Is it possible to change the prices of cafeteria food so that healthier choices would cost less and less healthy choices would cost more? YES______ NO_______ 6. Are food or beverage promotions and advertising allowed in the school? YES______ NO_______ If Yes: What types of foods and beverages? 7. Does the school have vending machines students can use? YES______ NO_______ (INTERVIEWER: If YES, ask the person you are interviewing to see the vending machine at the end of your interview and then list items below) If NO, go to question 11.

   

102    Food Chips – regular Chips – low-fat or pretzels Crackers/ Chex Mix Crackers with cheese or peanut butter Fruit or vegetable Granola/cereal bars Nuts/trail mix Candy Cookies/snack cakes/pastries Low-fat cookies and baked goods Other food: Beverages Soda (regular) Diet soda Fruit drink (less than 50% real juice) Fruit juice (at least 50% real juice) Water Sports drinks Iced tea, lemonade, or other sweetened drink Whole or 2% milk (including flavored) Low-fat/1% milk or fat-free milk (including flavored) Other drinks:

8. If the school has vending machines, what is the revenue used for?

9. Would you be interested in seeing if more healthy items and fewer less healthy items could be offered in the machines? YES______ NO_______ 10. Is free, fresh tap water available to students throughout the day? YES______ NO_______ 11. Does this school have a garden? YES______ NO_______ (If NO, skip to question 15) If Yes: How big is the garden? 12. If the school has a garden: Is the space permanently set aside for a garden? YES______    

103    NO_______ 13. If the school has a garden: How is the garden used? _____Educational purposes during school hours _____Educational purposes in after school programs _____Other (Please describe below)

14. If the school does not have a garden: Would you like to see a garden at this school? YES______ NO_______ 15. If the school does not have a garden: Which of the following factors would make it possible for the school to create a garden for garden-based learning during or after school? _____Interest from students _____Interest from teachers _____Interest from parents _____Information about how to incorporate gardening into school (lessons, presentations) _____Space available and suitable for a garden _____Time in the schedule to incorporate a garden _____Other (please specify below) 16. Do you have any classroom or school-wide fundraising activities that include food sales? YES______ NO_______ If Yes: What foods are sold?

17. Is food used in classrooms as a reward? YES______ NO_______ If Yes: What foods are used?

18. Do you have any guidelines or rules about what kind of treats can be served in classrooms for special occasions like birthdays? YES______ NO_______ Section 2: Food, fitness and health education. 19. What programs or class lessons are used to provide nutrition education or to encourage students to make healthier nutrition choices? (Please list topics)    

104    20. Were any student assemblies or other events held during the last year in which speakers addressed food and health-related topics? YES______ NO_______ If Yes, please list topics.

21. Would you be interested in increasing parental involvement in nutrition promotion activities at school? YES______ NO______ 22. [INTERVIEWER – THIS QUESTION FOR HIGH SCHOOLS ONLY] Does this school provide breastfeeding education? YES______ NO_______ 23. How many months of the school year do students have physical education class? _______months _______entire school year 24. Is there a maximum class size for PE classes at your school? YES______ NO_______ If Yes, what percentage of PE classes are at or below that maximum class size? ______All classes are at or below maximum class size ______percent are at or below maximum class size 25. Is there sufficient equipment for PE classes? YES______ NO_______ If No, what is needed?

Section 3: Health and fitness activities. 26. Do you have data about how students get to and from school (percentage who walk, bike etc.) YES______ NO_______ If Yes, ask for percentage of students who do the following: _____percent walk    

105    _____percent bike _____percent are dropped off in car _____percent drive themselves [HIGH SCHOOLS ONLY] _____percent ride the a school bus _____percent ride a city bus _____percent skate or use a skateboard _____percent ride push scooters 27. Does this school have the following facilities that support biking and walking to and from school? _______Bike racks _______Traffic signals near the school _______Crossing guards _______Any other? (Please describe below) 28. Does the school have any of the following programs to encourage biking and walking to and from school? ______Safe Routes to School ______Walking school bus ______Walk to school or bike to school days ______Bike maintenance or earn-a-bike programs ______Provide free or low cost bikes, helmets and bicycle safety information If not, would you be interested in learning more about these programs and how to include them here? YES______ NO_______ 29. How much time do students have for recess each day? _________minutes 30. Is recess before or after lunch? ____before lunch ____after lunch 31. Is recess time structured or is it free play time? ____structured ____free play time 32. Are the playground and other outdoor play areas adjacent to street traffic? ______adjacent to a street – no fence ______adjacent to street – with fence ______not adjacent to a street 33. Is the playground supervised during recess? YES______ NO_______    

106    34. If Yes, who is the playground supervisor? ______teacher ______other volunteer ______staff person ______combination ______parent ______other (please specify) Section 4: Health and fitness facilities available on school grounds. 35. Does the school have the following facilities for use during PE classes or recess? (check all that apply): _______Playground _______ Blacktop _______Play structures _______Indoor gymnasium _______Grass or turf fields _______Covered areas outside _______Track _______Water fountains _______Any other facilities for PE or recess? (Please describe below) 36. Are any of these facilities open to community members outside of school hours for recreation? (For example, before or after school, evenings, weekends or school vacation)? YES______ NO_______ If Yes, which facilities are open to community members? _______Playground _______ Blacktop _______Play structures _______Indoor gymnasium _______Grass or turf fields _______Covered areas outside _______Track _______Water fountains _______Other facilities? (Please describe below)

37. Does your school have joint use agreements with organizations that use school facilities for sports programs and other recreation activities? YES______ NO_______ If Yes, do you have a brochure or other document that describes these that I can have? If not, please describe the programs: a. Programs for children: b. Programs for adolescents: c. Programs for adults:

   

107    Section 5: Other topics. 38. Are there any issues related to safety or injury prevention at your school that need to be addressed or improved? 39. Are there any barriers to implementing the school district wellness policies at your school? YES______ NO_______ If Yes, please describe the barriers. 40. What does the school do to promote wellness among school staff? 41. Would you be interested in developing an employee wellness program? YES______ NO_______ This is the end of the survey. Thank you very much for taking the time to meet with me. If you have any additional comments or questions, please feel free to contact me. My phone and email address are on the consent form I gave you. INTERVIEWER – PLEASE ASK TO SEE THE VENDING MACHINE IF THE PERSON YOU INTERVIEWED SAID THE SCHOOL HAS A VENDING MACHINE STUDENTS CAN USE. INTERVIEWER: IF THE PERSON YOU INTERVIEWED REFERRED YOU TO SOMEONE ELSE TO GET ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, WRITE THE NAME(S) AND PHONE NUMBER(S) HERE:

INTERVIEWER: Before leaving the school, please observe the availability and conditions of sidewalks and crosswalks around the school. Describe conditions below. Sidewalks: ______sidewalks along streets around school site? ______good conditions? (few cracks, no obstructions from trees, etc. while walking) Other comments on sidewalks: Crosswalks: ______crosswalks at corners around school site? ______any traffic signals at street crossings? Other comments on crosswalks:  

   

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Oral Consent Statement for Interviewees King County Food and Fitness Initiative (KCFFI) School Survey - Oral Consent Statement May 1, 2009 The purpose of this interview is to conduct a school survey to inform the King County Food and Fitness Initiative (KCFFI). The Initiative received a two-and-a-half-year grant in 2006 to create a multi-year action plan with the potential for implementation support. We are one of nine communities chosen to be part of Food & Fitness, a national project of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Food & Fitness believes that together we can advance opportunities for all children and families to thrive, beginning with food and fitness and building from there. The Kellogg Foundation sees this Initiative as a strategy for social change to address healthy eating and physical activity and to move toward social and health equity by supporting families and children. The KCFFI focus communities are Delridge and White Center. The organizations leading the Initiative include Washington State University-King County Extension, Public Health-Seattle & King County, the White Center Community Development Association, the Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association, and the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, and more than 50 collaborative partners committed to improving the places we live, learn, work, and play. This survey is also part of a project that Don Kramer, a graduate student at the University of Washington, is working on for a graduate thesis project. Mr. Kramer’s project is to develop a survey that community members can use to gather information about food and fitness in schools. Community members will then use the information from the survey in the implementation and evaluation process for the multi-year grant. Community members will conduct the survey at schools in Delridge and White Center this spring. • •

• •

Your participation in the survey is voluntary and you may decline to answer questions at any time. The information will not be confidential. Because the project is intended to give community members participating in the Initiative information about the schools in the neighborhoods, the project report will include specific references to schools and individuals who participate in the survey. The information I collect during our conversation will be incorporated into Mr. Kramer’s thesis document which he will give to the KCFFI leadership organizations mentioned above. The survey should take approximately 30 minutes and includes questions about food services in your school, nutrition education, physical education programs and facilities, and may also involve a brief observation of the school facilities for physical education and activities at your school.

I appreciate your participation in this survey project. If you have any questions or comments after our meeting, feel free to contact Erin MacDougall at Public Health-Seattle & King County at [email protected] or 206-263-8804 or Don Kramer at 206.406.1325 or [email protected]. Thank you.    

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School District Contact Information Nutrition Services: Chris Neal, Director Nutrition Services Highline Public Schools 206.433.2209 [email protected] Wendy Weyer, R.D., Administrative Dietitian, Nutrition Services Seattle Public Schools 206.252.0677 [email protected] Physical Education: Wendy Sayan (also Nutrition Education contact) Highline Public Schools 206.433.2458 [email protected] Lori S Dunn, K-12 Physical Education Program Manager Seattle Public Schools 206 252 0839 [email protected]

   

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State and Other Agency Contact Information Child Nutrition Services Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction 360.725.6200 Lisa Rakoz, Program Supervisor Health and Fitness Education Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction 360.725.4977 [email protected] Farm-to-School Program Tricia Sexton Kovacs WSDA Farm-to-School Program 360.902.2029 [email protected] Washington Grown Fruits and Vegetables Grant Program Gaye Lynn MacDonald Administrator, OSPI WA Grown Program 360.510.9773 [email protected] Summer Food Service Program (City of Seattle) Deborah Harris City of Seattle Human Services Department (Summer Food Service Program) 206.684.8852 [email protected]

   

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Safe Routes to School/Active Transportation Resources Feet First, a Seattle-based walking advocacy organization, and the Bicycle Alliance of Washington, a statewide bicycling advocacy organization, created the Center for Safe Routes to School in Washington State as a resource about SRTS programs. Center for Safe Routes to School in Washington State www.saferoutes-wa.org [email protected] 206.224.9252 [email protected] 206.652.2310 Feet First Jen Cole, Safe Routes to School Program Director 314 1st Avenue South Seattle, WA 98104 206.652.2310 www.feetfirst.info Bicycle Alliance of Washington (see Center for Safe Routes to School in Washington State info above) Washington Department of Transportation SRTS Program Charlotte Claybrooke, Safe Routes to School Coordinator [email protected] 360.705.7302 www.wsdot.wa.gov/localprograms/saferoutes/ National Center for Safe Routes is a national clearinghouse of information about SRTS. www.saferoutesinfo.org

   

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Highline Public Schools nutrition standards

   

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Seattle Public Schools distribution and sales of competitive foods procedure

   

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Seattle Public Schools nutrition education procedure

   

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