When the federal Child Nutrition and Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Reauthorization Act passed in 2004, it became crunch time for schools across the country. The law required all public schools to evaluate their nutrition and exercise programs and establish new, effective student wellness policies by the 2006–2007 school year.
Amidst the worry that ensued, Stacey Snelling recognized a timely—but golden—opportunity: What if AU’s health promotion management graduate students worked with local districts to evaluate the efficacy of their current nutrition and exercise plans? For the communities involved, it would mean program evaluations conducted by skilled volunteers; for the students, it would provide valuable work experience in a nascent area of health policy promotion. “It was a community service opportunity that would also provide students with really cutting-edge research projects,” says Snelling, who teaches in the School of Education, Teaching, and Health (SETH) and has directed SETH’s undergraduate program in health promotion management since 1997.
Arlington County was the first to sign on. In 2005, Snelling and Casey Korba (MS health promotion management ’05) went into three Arlington high schools to answer two questions: What types of foods were offered in the schools’ cafeterias, and which ones were students actually buying?
The results were alarming on both counts. While foods associated with the national school lunch program conformed to nutrition standards by law, these traditional meals accounted for only a small portion of sales. Most kids were buying “competitive foods”—a la carte items that are responsible for a growing amount of school revenue and are not held to the same stringent federal nutrition standards. Most of these foods were low in nutritional value and high in calories and fat—and, says Snelling, “that’s what the kids were going for.”
“We had a hypothesis that competitive foods are diluting the nutritional value of the lunch program,” adds Korba. “What was surprising was just how bad it actually was.”
In addition to providing Arlington schools with quantitative data on what their students were consuming at lunch, Snelling
and Korba also advised the schools to work with vendors to decrease the amount of unhealthy competitive food offerings and increase the healthy ones. Their research and recommendations were published in the American School Health Association’s Journal of School Health in December 2007.
“For me, the biggest lesson was that the schools are doing this because their hands are really tied,” says Korba. “The competitive foods are bringing in a lot of revenue [that the schools need]. We sit in our classrooms and read about these theories and talk about how we’re going to change the world, but it’s more complex than that. Having this experience in the real world gave me an opportunity to see how to make change and why it’s so hard to do.”
The project also provided a springboard for follow-up thesis work by other graduate students in the program. Currently, Teha Kennard and Jennifer Yezek (both MS health promotion management ’08) are making subsequent wellness program recommendations and conducting follow-up evaluations to determine how much better kids’ diets are as a result of the reauthorization bill’s implementation. In addition, Nicole Reynolds (MS health promotion management ’08) began working with Snelling to investigate physical activity patterns among middle and high school students in D.C. Public Schools.
These projects are the most recent examples of the health promotion management program’s long-standing philosophies being put into action. “When we started the MS program in 1980, the idea was that we would also provide a realworld experience to complement the classroom setting,” says Bob Karch, director of the health promotion management master’s program. “Snelling’s work is an example of how we try to get students involved in real-life experiences.”
At a time when childhood obesity in America is increasing, it’s also a project of acute relevance. “The habits of middle and high school students are likely to stay with them as adults,” says Snelling. “When you look at that, forming healthy habits and maintaining health at an early age is essential.”
“If fine arts were supported like sports are in our society, there would be no starving artists,” notes Annemarie Kaim Collins (MFA fine arts ’87). An artist and poet currently living in Martinsburg, West Virginia, Collins dedicates much of her time and energy to elevating the role of art in society by raising arts awareness and increasing opportunities for artists and writers of all ages.
Most recently, she established the Anne K. Collins Scholarship endowment at American University—a fund dedicated to providing opportunities to MFA students in studio art and creative writing. “People who follow paths of creativity do not have the same guarantees in life as those pursuing other professions,” Collins says. “I wanted to create this fund at AU, which had a major role in shaping me as an artist, to help fine artists and writers do what they really want to do.”
In 2003, Collins cofounded Athens on the Opequon, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting interest in traditional poetry, literature, and fine arts in the Martinsburg area and beyond. Once a month, society members meet to facilitate workshops with local writers, and they are regularly invited to speak at local schools about issues related to cultural awareness and arts appreciation. The group also organizes “Hearts for the Arts,” a two-day, biannual festival that features more than 50 writers, painters, photographers, and artists who, through sharing and selling their work, demonstrate the importance arts have within the community.
Collins’s artwork has been exhibited in galleries in Washington, D.C., and New York, New York. A native of Germany, she also has two paintings hanging in an office building of the German parliament.
Collins welcomes AU students, staff, faculty, and alumni to exhibit their work at Athens on the Opequon’s upcoming “Fall for the Arts” festival, scheduled for September 13–14 in nearby Martinsburg. For more information, visit www.athenspoetry- club.org or contact Collins directly at 304-267-7567 or annemarie@ix.netcom.com.
—Contributed by CAS’s Office of Development
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