Success Story - Schools Surveys
November 2004
Contact Person
Maria Maribona, Evaluation and Assessment Coordinator
Steps to a Healthier Clark County
Assessment and Research Unit, Clark County Health Department
Funded Community
Community Choices
Clark County , Washington
Briefly Describe:
Clark County School Food Choices and Physical Education Practice Questionnaires: Assessment and Community Engagement Tool
- The activity, accomplishment, success (and how it relates to your Community Action Plan)
Steps to a Healthier Clark County completed two baseline assessment school questionnaires: the School Food Choices Questionnaire and the Physical Education Practices Questionnaire. The purpose of the surveys was to assess existing school nutrition and physical activity practices while engaging a core set of local grass-root school staff around the STEPS objectives. - Project partners (if any)
Steps to a Healthier Clark County partnered with school staff to complete the questionnaires throughout Clark County from July to September 2004. Questionnaires were completed by school physical education and health teachers, intervention specialists, school nurses, nutrition staff, and administrators across Clark County school districts. - Steps costs, resources, in-kind, or contributions
School contracts: $35,907.48
Staff: $8,999.00 - Would you consider the activity, accomplishment, or success a promising practice or a “lessons learned” for other funded communities? Why?
From a community development or community partner engagement perspective the questionnaires were a definitive success in that it gave grass-root school staff a task to accomplish and purpose to come to the table: collecting data to assess the issue.
The data collection component was not perfect. For example, at the schools’ request the questionnaires were completed during the summer due to perceived teacher availability. However, many teachers were not available and no one remembered that many vending machines are emptied in the summer, making vending machine inventories difficult to complete! As with any survey there are questions that we would modify for future use and double planned time allocated for analysis and report writing.
The questionnaires provide baseline assessment data which is critical to measuring intervention success. We will probably not be completing the exact questionnaire at the end of our STEPS grant period, but we do plan to review school nutrition and physical-activity policies to see changes made over time.
A local success is that Vancouver School District used the information from the report as part of the data presented to their school board’s work session addressing nutrition and physical education policies on November 29, 2004. The other two school intervention teams will also be using the questionnaire reports as general baseline information. A copy of the Vancouver School District School Food Choices and Physical Education
