AGENCY TESTIMONY
Barriers to providing required health education
0:35:19
ยท
127 sec
Despina Zaharakis outlines several challenges in providing students with required health education in NYC schools.
- Lack of understanding about components and importance of quality health education among educators and families
- Difficulties in programming for the required 54 hours of instruction in some schools
- Challenges in staffing full-time health education teachers, especially in smaller schools
- Impact of COVID-19 on understanding and implementing health education requirements
Despina Zaharakis
0:35:19
So thank you, and I'm glad we got to see the video.
0:35:23
So this is our why, our collective why.
0:35:26
And now I wanted to go back to focus on the how.
0:35:30
We're gonna get this done for every child in New York City.
0:35:35
We know there are some barriers to providing students with required health education, which include a lack of understanding about the components and importance of quality health education by educators and families.
0:35:48
Many only know health education from the instruction they received in school.
0:35:54
For schools not implementing a 1 semester model, many do not program for the required 54 hours.
0:36:02
For example, some schools are implementing a yearly model of 1 period a week.
0:36:07
That would only provide about 27 hours of instruction.
0:36:12
We started checking for the 54 hours of health education in middle school in, in middle school grades in 2017.
0:36:20
New York State had updated course time requirement guidance on remote and hybrid remote instruction due to COVID in 2019 and 'twenty and 2020 and 21.
0:36:32
So we had to recommunicate and reestablish the 54 hour requirement for teachers, schools, and superintendents, and their teams.
0:36:42
Small school size is also a challenge to staffing a full time health education teacher, which is why we do continuous outreach to teachers assigned to teach health education to recruit them for professional learning opportunities and to ensure they have updated curricula and instructional materials.
0:37:01
We also reach out to school and district leaders and their teams about the importance of their instructional staff attending training and having the most up to date instructional materials.
0:37:14
In addition to teachers and school leaders, we are working with superintendent teams to foster stronger understanding of and support for health and sexual health education requirements.