Staff Trainings & Toolkits

Policy and practice in action – programs and strategies for school health teams

The path to better health often starts with a fresh perspective. And so HealthMPowers supports a range of programs – and approaches – to launching positive changes within your school or community.

Most of our programs are offered as highly interactive, in-person trainings. First among these are the action planning sessions that drive your progress as a Health Empowered school or site. But we also offer standalone, DIY toolkits for developing health and wellness policies, or creating a culture of health based on the Whole School, Whole Child, Whole Community or WSCC model.

In our fun and dynamic trainings, you’ll try out the strategies and techniques you’ll be using with your students. We get you engaged and in the game in ways that stimulate creative thinking and make it easier to take these new skills and strategies back to your school or site.

Health Empowered Center Trainings

Funded by

Your progress as a Health Empowered early care center will be guided by a series of fun and flexibly scheduled staff trainings each year. During these highly interactive sessions, your Center Health Team will determine which nutrition and physical activity goals make sense for your center’s unique culture and climate and develop an action plan for boosting nutrition and physical activity over time. Along the way, you’ll expand your professional skills and get access to a wide range of resources and support as you build a healthy environment that empowers your children and staff.

Want to know more? See what a Health Empowered early care center looks like.

Eat. Move. Talk!

Eat. Move. Talk! offers practical strategies for engaging children in small, everyday actions that grow into life-changing behaviors.

The toolkit and one-day training reveal why sharing and modeling the right kinds of eating, moving and talking with young children is so important to their growth and development. The program offers –

Information and guidelines for each healthy habit
Tips and activities to practice in your center and at home
Developmental milestones for healthy eating, moving and talking from birth to age five
Success stories from early care centers adopting these behaviors
Handouts for families, resources and related trainings, and next steps

Eat. Move. Talk! was developed together with the Georgia Department of Public Health, the Atlanta Speech School, Emory University and other partners.

Now the program is being expanded through special learning collaboratives that provide Eat. Move. Talk! training and peer support to early care providers in high-need communities across the state.

Learn how to bring Eat. Move. Talk! to your center.

Growing Fit

Growing Fit can help your center develop a health and wellness policy that supports and grows early care best practices. The Growing Fit toolkit supports the state’s efforts to improve early care and education quality through its Quality℠ Rated system.

Both the toolkit – and one-day training – will lead your staff through the process of creating a policy step by step as you build on the strengths of your center while identifying areas for improvement. The program includes –

Explanation on the importance of having a wellness policy
Self-assessment tool for evaluating center practices
Success stories from other early care centers
Healthy eating and physical activity resources
Suggestions and examples for writing the policy

Growing Fit springs from our partnership with the Georgia Department of Public Health, Georgia Shape, and the Georgia Department of Early Learning/Bright from the Start.

Learn how to bring Growing Fit to your center.

Health Empowered School Trainings

Funded by

Your progress as a Health Empowered school will be guided by a series of fun and flexibly scheduled staff trainings each year. During these highly interactive sessions, your School Health Team will determine which nutrition and physical activity goals make sense for your unique school culture and climate and develop an action plan for boosting nutrition and physical activity over time. Along the way, you’ll expand your professional skills and get access to a wide range of resources and support as you build a healthy environment that empowers your students, staff and school community.

Want to know more? See what a Health Empowered elementary school looks like.

Power Up for 30

Power Up for 30 helps kickoff increased healthy activity throughout a child’s day. In this behavior-changing training, educators experience and identify creative ways to add at least 30 minutes of physical activity into the day for all students – before, during or after school.

Power Up for 30 is offered as a one-day training for elementary school educators and includes:

Highly interactive peer engagement
New training designed especially for school counselors, classroom teachers, and even boosters trainings for elementary schools seeking to recharge their commitment to physical activity in the school day
An evidence-based framework built on CDC guidelines^*
Strategies for getting less-active kids, or those with physical differences, off the sidelines and into play

^*Power Up for 30 is based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Comprehensive School Physical Activity Program guidelines, or CSPAP.

FitnessGram^®

All Georgia public schools are required to measure the fitness of students in grades 1 – 12 yearly using the Cooper Institute’s FitnessGram assessment.

This standardized, non-competitive assessment evaluates each student’s fitness in five key areas – aerobic capacity, body composition, flexibility, muscular strength, and muscular endurance – against objective, criterion-referenced performance levels or “healthy fitness zones.”

In this one-day training, HealthMPowers shows P.E. teachers how to successfully conduct assessments with students and score their results using FitnessGram software. The training provides practical tips and inspiration, including –

how to record fitness data using FitnessGram software
how to track trends and measure fitness changes over time
how to compare fitness to academic achievement and attendance
how to help students interpret scores and set personal fitness goals
how to build a better P.E. that increases student participation and activity levels
the importance of your role in assessing and expanding the health of your school population

To learn more about signing up for FitnessGram training, email us.

Breakfast After the Bell

In partnership with Share Our Strength, HealthMPowers is working to expand and support innovative breakfast programs in schools across the state, especially in high-need areas.

Breakfast After the Bell seeks to combat hunger and food insecurity – and fuel active learning for all kids – through a range of new breakfast models, including Breakfast in the Classroom, Grab-and-Go breakfasts, and Second Chance Breakfast.

These initiatives can boost student breakfast participation by 63% or more, helping students get the nutrients and calories they need to focus and perform well physically, academically and socially.

Funding support for Breakfast After the Bell is available from a range of sources. To learn how you can build a better breakfast at your school, please reach out to our School Breakfast Support Specialist.

Email us

Health Empowered School Trainings

Funded by

Your progress as a Health Empowered school will be guided by a series of fun and flexibly scheduled staff trainings each year. During these highly interactive sessions, your School Health Team determine which nutrition and physical activity goals make sense for your unique school culture and climate, and develop an action plan for boosting nutrition and physical activity over time. Along the way, you’ll expand your professional skills and get access to a wide range of resources and support as you build a culture of health that empowers your students, staff and school community.

Want to know more? See what a Health Empowered secondary school looks like.

Power Up for 30

Power Up for 30 is offered as a one-day training for secondary school educators and includes:

Highly interactive peer engagement
New training designed especially for school counselors, classroom teachers, and even boosters trainings for secondary schools seeking to recharge their commitment to physical activity in the school day
An evidence-based framework built on CDC guidelines^*
Strategies for getting less-active kids, or those with physical differences, off the sidelines and into play

Learn more about the Power Up for 30 transformation.

^*Power Up for 30 is based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Comprehensive School Physical Activity Program guidelines, or CSPAP.

FitnessGram^®

All Georgia public schools are required to measure the fitness of students in grades 1 – 12 yearly using the Cooper Institute’s FitnessGram assessment.

how to record fitness data using FitnessGram software
how to track trends and measure fitness changes over time
how to compare fitness to academic achievement and attendance
how to help students interpret scores and set personal fitness goals
how to build a better P.E. that increases student participation and activity levels
the importance of your role in assessing and expanding the health of your school population

To learn more about signing up for FitnessGram training, email us.

Breakfast After the Bell

In partnership with Share Our Strength, HealthMPowers is working to expand and support innovative breakfast programs in schools across the state, especially in high-need areas.

These initiatives can boost student breakfast participation by 63% or more, helping students get the nutrients and calories they need to focus and perform well physically, academically and socially.

Email us

SNAP-Ed
Power Up for 30

Health Empowered Out of School Time Trainings

Funded by

Your progress as a Health Empowered out of school time (OST) site will be guided by a series of fun and flexibly scheduled trainings each year. In these fun and creative sessions geared to the National Aftercare Association’s Healthy Eating and Physical Activity (HEPA) standards, your OST Health Team will build an action plan for boosting nutrition and physical activity over time. Along the way, you’ll expand your professional skills and get access to a wide range of resources and support as you build a culture of health that empowers your youth, staff and community.

Want to know more? See what Health Empowered out of school time looks like.

Power Up for 30

Power Up for 30 is offered as a one-day training and includes:

Highly interactive peer engagement
An evidence-based framework built on CDC guidelines^*
Strategies for getting less-active kids, or those with physical differences, off the sidelines and into play

Learn more about the Power Up for 30 transformation.

^*Power Up for 30 is based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Comprehensive School Physical Activity Program guidelines, or CSPAP.

SNAP-Ed

Health Empowered Communities

Funded by

Our Community Engagement Specialists work closely with local community partners, store retailers, farmers and food pantries to co-host community health programs and events. These efforts are part of an important wrap-around effect. In areas where we’re already working with children in early care centers, schools and out of school time sites, we can amplify our impact on the families and communities who support these children through powerful outreach and social messaging.

Going beyond outreach alone, we also share data about local health trends with our retail partner sites and other entities, including –

Local health departments and housing authorities
Family Connection
Parks and Recreation
School, Boys & Girls Clubs and Head Starts

Want to know more? See what a Health Empowered community looks like.

Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child Overview

WSCC Team Training Modules were created in collaboration with The Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE).

Modules are ready-made professional development resources for use by states, districts or local schools to build, strengthen and sustain school teams implementing the WSCC model.

The ten training modules stand-alone – a module is not dependent on another – allowing the user to create a personalized professional development plan based on the needs of the schools or districts.

Each module is approximately one hour in length.

The WSCC Overview module explores the essential elements of the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) Model including the five tenets, ten components and community engagement. Participants assess their school’s current level of engagement.

Making the Case: Building and Sustaining Administrative Support

Making the Case: Building and Sustaining Administrative Support examines the relationship between health and academics and the need for administrative buy-in for building and sustaining a high functioning WSCC team.