Academy Fellow Dr. John V. Waller.

Members of the Academy became especially interested in a school health education project after the Committee on Medicine in Society sponsored the 1970 conference Community Participation for Equity and Excellence in Health Care. Minutes from 1971–72 meetings of the Committee on Public Health include discussions of launching a school health education program, but it wasn’t until later in the 1970s that the project came to fruition under the leadership of Academy Fellow Dr. John V. Waller (1910–1995).

Waller had become interested in the idea of developing a health education program for young schoolchildren. As he explained in a 1982 interview: “It came out of an interest in the general welfare. It seemed to me that the problems of family life planted seeds of behavior disruptive to health, and this could be turned around by introducing a health education program in the schools—and the younger the children we reach, the better.” Waller assembled a coalition of interested groups including the American Lung Association and the United Hospital Fund. A coalition member drew the group’s attention to a well-received school health program developed in Seattle and Berkeley that was now being tested in Long Island. Waller was impressed by his visits to participating schools and obtained funding from the Board of Education and private companies, including MetLife and Bankers Trust, to introduce a pilot program in New York City.

A teacher demonstrates proper toothbrushing techniques to a group of kindergarten children as a visitor from a funding agency looks on.

In 1979 Growing Healthy in New York City began in five elementary schools, in a five-year pilot project. After the program's first year, it was evaluated by a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College and the National Center for Health Education. The program received a positive evaluation, though with recommendations for simplification to account for the “complex environment of New York City schools.” In recognition of his work on the program, in 1985 Waller was given the Academy Plaque, for exceptional service; in 1988 he was given the Distinguished Service Award by the United Hospital Fund of New York.

In 1984 the program became the official health curriculum for New York City schools. By the end of 1986 Growing Healthy had expanded to middle schools as the Being Healthy program; in 1995 the program expanded again in a pilot project for city high schools, Staying Healthy. The programs improved children’s reading and language skills, in addition to giving them valuable knowledge about health and building healthy habits from a young age. A 1988 evaluation by the CDC found “higher reading and mathematics scores among students in several grade levels who had participated in the program compared with those who did not.”

A teacher training workshop in the 1980s.

In 1991, NYAM established an Office of School Health Programs, under the direction of Leslie Goldman, who had been with the Growing Healthy project since its beginning. The office managed and grew these programs nationally, so that by the early 2000s they were the “largest public/private-sector-supported health education initiatives of its kind in the United States.” Though the office was disbanded in 2012, its programming positively affected children’s health education for decades.