Tools for Schools

• Team Nutrition: Becoming a Team Nutrition School helps focus the attention on the important role healthy meals and nutrition education plays in the school environment.Team Nutrition provides program materials to encourage students to make food and physical activity choices for a healthy lifestyle.
  
• HealthierUS Schools Challenge: The Challenge recognizes schools that take specific steps to promote a healthy school environment by serving healthy foods, and by providing nutrition education and physical education.
  
• National School Lunch Program: Encourage families to enroll their children in school meal programs.Schools that operate the National School Lunch Program and also offer an afterschool care program with regularly scheduled educational activities may also offer Afterschool Snacks.
  
• School Breakfast Program: Encourage schools to promote and expand the School Breakfast Program as a way of supporting positive outcomes for children. Various strategies include:Breakfast in the Classroom, Breakfast after First Period, Grab 'N' Go, and Breakfast Carts. (18)
• Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program: Assist your local school in applying for the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program (FFVP), which provides free fresh fruits and vegetables in selected low-income elementary schools nationwide.
• Let's Move! Salad Bars to Schools: This is a comprehensive grassroots public health effort to mobilize and engage stakeholders at the local, state and national level to support salad bars in schools. Our vision is to significantly increase salad bars in schools across the country, with the goal to provide at least 6,000 salad bars to schools in the next three years.

Increase Opportunities for Physical Activity

• The Presidential Active Lifestyle Award (PALA) is part of the President's Challenge Program, an initiative dedicated to getting people fit and active. Through PALA, young people and adults record their physical activity each day, with the goal of being active 60 minutes a day (or 30 minutes a day for adults), at least 5 days a week.
  
• Safe Routes to School: This program enables communities to improve safety and encourage more children to safely walk and bicycle to school. You can work with your state to access various Department of Transportation funds that encourage safe a physically active ways for students to get to schools.
  
• Carol M. White Physical Education Program: This program can be used to provide equipment and support to enable students to participate actively in physical education activities.
• Diabetes Education in Tribal Schools: The DETS project is part of a national effort to decrease the incidence and improve the care of type-2 diabetes among American Indians and Alaska Natives, and features a multidisciplinary K-12 curriculum.
• GoGirlGo!: This curriculum from the Women's Sports Foundation (WSF) combines physical activity with education to focus on reducing and preventing health-risk behaviors.

Increase Access to Healthy, Affordable, and Traditional Foods

• School /Community Garden Development:School gardens are places that provide the chance for physical activity and educational opportunities. Many Tribal organizations also connect this activity with the teaching of traditional cultural knowledge around food and agriculture. For garden advice from the USDA's People's Garden, please visit the People's Garden (36)