Q&A
Barriers to implementing required health instruction for 8th graders
1:58:39
·
120 sec
Council Member Rita Joseph inquires about the specific barriers that have led to only 58% of 8th graders receiving the required 54 hours of health instruction. A DOE official explains the challenges and changes in implementation since 2017.
- Monitoring of 54-hour requirement began in 2017 due to inconsistent programming
- Communication challenges in informing schools about the new requirements
- Disruptions caused by remote and hybrid learning during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Need to re-communicate requirements after returning to in-person learning
- Gradual improvement in compliance, but more work needed to reach full implementation
Rita Joseph
1:58:39
What specific barriers have contributed to only 58% of 8th graders receiving the required 54 hours of health instruction during the 2023 2024 school year?
Despina Zaharakis
1:58:50
I think, some I outlined in the in the testimony what we only started checking for 54 hours in 2017, and we started that because we noticed that, you know, we before 2017, we were looking at courses.
1:59:06
Do students have health education on their transcript?
1:59:09
And the answer was yes.
1:59:11
And we looked at, you know, they counted as, like, check, check off the box.
1:59:15
They got it.
1:59:16
But when, our folks, our health ed team, was in schools and looking at how students were programmed, they were saying that they were not programmed to meet a lot.
1:59:28
If they were programmed for 1 semester, they met the 54 hour requirement.
1:59:33
For for schools that dragged out the classes, like 2 period 1 period a week for a year, that would not meet the requirements.
1:59:42
So that's why we started checking for the 54 hours.
1:59:45
Communicating that out to schools took a while to make sure that they understood they had to, a, program for 54 hours, and that was the measure that we would be held holding them to.
1:59:56
That's the state requirement.
1:59:58
We started in 2017, and then we hit, you know, remote learning with, and hybrid learning and relaxed sort of time requirements.
2:00:09
Although students had to meet all the requirements of the content, there were relaxed time requirements to allow for hybrid models and remote models.
2:00:19
So then when we came back, we had to recomunicate everything.
2:00:23
So we are going up, but we have work to do.
2:00:27
But that was a little sort of slip right there from the time we started with the 54 hours to, 2022.
2:00:36
So, you know, we had to re up our communication.