School Wellness Policies Key to Ensuring New York Schools Adopt Healthier Nutrition and Exercise Standards
May 2020
New York’s Creating Healthy Schools and Communities (CHSC) program is an initiative to increase access to healthy, affordable foods, and opportunities for physical activity in some of the state’s high-need school districts. As part of the program, schools worked with district-level officials to assess their written wellness policies using the WellSAT, an online written wellness policy assessment measure.
Study findings indicated that schools within districts with strong policies were nearly twice as likely to implement overall wellness practices compared to schools in districts with weak policies or no policies at all.