Healthy habits start young!
For the last 12 years, schools within Berkeley County School District have worked with the MUSC Boeing Center for Children’s Wellness to help students and staff live in a more holistically healthy way by implementing wellness initiatives at their schools, which fosters a better learning environment.
This Wednesday, BCSD hosted the BCSD Wellness Teams Awards Ceremony for its 37 participating schools.
Schools earned points on MUSC’s School Wellness Checklist by implementing staff and student wellness initiatives that focused on nutrition, physical fitness, social and emotional well-being, sustainability and more. Based off how well they scored throughout the 2023-2024 school year, schools were awarded funds by the MUSC Boeing Center for Children’s Wellness to go toward universal wellness initiatives next school year.
Schools could receive anywhere from $250 -$1,000 based off their point totals, and it was a tight race for the Grand Prize and other MUSC Wellness Awards.
With their school gardens, community health fairs and fitness groups, our schools saw remarkable gains from last year; 59 percent of participating schools increased their point totals from the previous school year by more than 15 percent.
But at the end of the night, Mount Holly Elementary walked away as the Grand Prize winner with a $2,000 check.
P.E. teacher Cheryl Baggett credited a large part of the school’s success to adding student running and walking clubs to MHE Club Days and using MHE’s student leader mentality to start a student wellness committee.
Additionally, Baggett leveled partnerships to bolster the school’s wellness initiatives, like having Home Depot rebuild the school’s garden beds and bringing the Stingray’s hockey players out to help with her hockey unit.
Baggett also did the work to find out what health initiatives teachers were already doing at MHE that she just wasn’t aware of to help add to the school’s point total.
“The checklist was asking for a journaling of like nutrition or healthy habits, so I put it out to all the fifth-grade teachers,” Baggett said. “One of them responded that they’d had their class make a flyer of why dinking soda wasn’t good for you, so I turned that in as part of the initiative.”
With all these things at play, MHE was able to almost double their point total from last year and reach 300 points this year. Awesome job, Falcons!
Congratulations are also in order for Westview Primary who won the Rising Star Award and an additional $1,000, J.K Gourdin Elementary who got first-runner up and an extra $500, and College Park Middle who was second-runner up and also received another $500.
