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Spotlight: District 1 District Wellness Steering Committee
In this issue of School Wellness Weekly, we highlight the District Wellness Steering Committee in District 1 in Manhattan, an Office of School Wellness Programs (OSWP) partner district. The steering committee is an advisory group of district, school-based, and OSWP staff that builds expertise and coordinates support for healthy school environments and high-quality health education, physical education, and physical activity programs for students. The Office of School Wellness Programs (OSWP) has worked closely with several NYCPS district leaders and superintendent support teams to create District Wellness Steering Committees, providing access to technical support, tools, and professional learning. Read the interview below with the District 1 Steering Committee to learn more.
What does student wellness look like in your district? How does your district define student wellness?
In District 1 (D1), our aim is for students to feel empowered in all aspects of their lives. Our goal is that D1 students have the skills to equip themselves for a healthy, joyful, and successful future.
How has the partnership with the Office of School Wellness Programs (OSWP) supported your work and helped support wellness programming?
Our partnership with OSWP has been instrumental in supporting our teachers and students. We have been able to learn together with a supportive Professional Learning Community for PE teachers, received wellness grants that have given schools power to create spaces for increased movement and meditation, and created a hydroponic garden vegetable-sharing program, to name a few examples.
Can you share a few examples of how your schools have improved PE and health education practices?
We have facilitated Physical Education Professional Learning Communities (PE PLCs) where educators collaboratively work together on problems of practice and co-develop actionable solutions. These sessions emphasize improving teacher practice in key instructional areas such as assessment strategies, questioning techniques, and facilitation of student discussion in PE settings. By focusing on these elements, we aim to deepen student engagement and elevate the overall quality of physical education instruction across the district.
Using funding from the Office of School Wellness Programs (OSWP), we expanded professional development opportunities for District 1 educators by:
- Training more teachers in the HealthSmart curriculum, ensuring they are equipped to deliver comprehensive, standards-based health education.
- Providing HIV education training, ensuring our students are meeting mandates and promoting informed instruction.
What strategies have been most effective in building a culture of wellness across your district?
We do this by ensuring our teachers work hard to know their students, emphasizing an asset-based mindset. We want our students to feel welcome and trust the adults that are working hard to meet their needs—academically, socially, emotionally—which is contributing to their overall mental and physical wellness.
What challenges have you faced, and how have you addressed them?
D1 is a small district, both geographically and in school size. This can be wonderful, as our school communities are truly communal, as teachers wear many hats supporting our students. It can also be a challenge. For example, being the only PE teacher in a building can be isolating because you don’t have a colleague to plan with or troubleshoot. We have worked to address this by getting the PE teachers together in our district for shared planning time, intervisitations, and offering shared learning opportunities. We want to continue to develop this with the support of OSWP by creating PE teacher leaders in the District.
What advice would you give to other districts looking to strengthen their own wellness practices?
Building wellness practices is really a collective effort. In a district, there are many streams of work. Having a team that represents those streams will lead to greater success, as group think-time helps clarify and build coherence. Our District 1 wellness team consists of members representing teacher development, student services, and attendance, to name a few. We feel that helps build our idea of wellness across the District.
What’s next for the D1 Wellness Steering Committee?
With continued support from OSWP, we hope to build our PE teacher leadership, support health education access, and create more physical fitness opportunities for D1 students, like our upcoming collaboration with New York Road Runners! We would also like to continue to find ways to monitor and assess our impact and effectiveness as a community that supports our schools. We are excited for the school year ahead.
(Photo: Right to left: Shoshana Lief, Sara Polland, Daemian Passarelli, Claire Lowenstein of the District 1 District Wellness Steering Committee. Courtesy District 1.)
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