The Health Education component is a planned, sequential, K-12 curriculum that addresses the physical, mental, emotional, and social dimensions of health. The curriculum is designed to motivate and assist students to maintain and improve their health, prevent disease, and reduce health-related risk behaviors. It allows students to develop and demonstrate increasingly sophisticated health-related knowledge, attitudes, skills, and practices. The comprehensive health education curriculum includes a variety of topics such as personal health, family health, community health, consumer health, environmental health, sexuality education, mental and emotional health, injury prevention and safety, nutrition, prevention and control of disease, and substance use and abuse.

Below are example strategies that support Health Education as part of the Coordinated School Health Model:

• Require a health education course for all students
• Hire certified health education teachers to teach health education
• Offer opportunities for professional development for health teachers
• Cover essential topics such as physical activity, healthy eating and tobacco use when teaching health education to students
• Align your health education curriculum with the State and National Health Education Standards
• Offer opportunities for collaboration between classroom teachers, counselors, food service, and school nurse to teach topics on health education

Looking for Resources? Go to Health Education Website Resources

Back to Eight Component Main Page