Evaluating King County School Nutrition Wellness Policies

Final Products

• Two Page Policy Brief

• Full Report

• Slide Presentation

Project Description

Phase I:  Collect Data

Phase II: Analyze Data

Phase III.  Prepare Reports and Presentation

Project Timeline

Evaluation

Project Description

Purpose:  The purpose of the project is to provide the King County Board of Health School Obesity Prevention Committee with up-to-date information about the school wellness policies that have been developed in each of the 19 school districts in King County and the challenges and successes associated with the implementation of those policies, so that the committee will be able to make informed recommendations for action to the Board of Health.

Objectives:  Between January 5, 2009 and March 16, 2009, the graduate students in the Public Health Nutrition class at the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine will:

1. Assess and evaluate king county school nutrition policies and their implementation

2. Create Policy Briefs on potential actions the BOH School Nutrition Committee could consider. Briefs would include existing evidence for the impact of each potential action, a short discussion of benefits and challenges of the action, potential support and opposition, and links to resources.

3. Compile and Present a Report that will include an executive summary, aggregated findings from the assessment, a discussion of the findings and implications for action.

Phase I: Collect data

Team A:  Collect, collate and evaluate existing information.

·      Using database that will be provided, abstract policies from 15 school districts in King County and compile with existing abstraction of 4 King County policies.  The abstraction tool may be found at: School Wellness Policy Evaluation Tool.  Policies may be found at: http://depts.washington.edu/waschool/wellness_policies/wa_policies.html

o       King County School Districts:

• If nutrition policies include specific standards for competitive foods sold outside of school meal programs, compare these standards to those for fat, saturated fat, sugar, and energy as outlined in:

• Washington Senate Bill 5093 http://apps.leg.wa.gov/documents/billdocs/2007-08/Pdf/Bills/Senate%20Passed%20Legislature/5093-S2.PL.pdf.

• Institute of Medicine recommendations for Foods Sold at school: (http://www.iom.edu/Object.File/Master/42/628/fact%20sheet.pdf)

• Collect information about each district, including the size, proportion eligible for Free and Reduced Price School Meals, WASL pass rate and demographics of students in school districts in King County : http://reportcard.ospi.k12.wa.us/summary.aspx?year=2007-08

• Determine geographic category of schools: http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/

• Add district-level data about policies, characteristics and geographic category for all 19 districts to the database.

• Prepare descriptive tables for 1) aggregate policy abstraction scores and sub-scores and 2) district characteristics

• Explore most descriptive and easy to understand graphic presentations of these data with bar charts or other visually descriptive methods

 Team B.  Schedule and conduct interviews

School District Assignments

• Conduct interviews with School District Superintendents: Use  previously established phone call schedule, make calls  to superintendents from each of the 19 districts. Interview script for Superintendents, Simple Interview Script for Superintendents; Interview Data Collection Form for Superintendents

• Using instructions provided in the Protocol for Scheduling Interviews, Schedule and conduct interviews with other school district personnel:  Using information provided from lists and information from superintendents, make phone or email contact with nutrition services administrators, health education curriculum leads and school board members from each of the districts to schedule phone interview times.  I

• Introduce the project with the following letters embedded in an email:  Nutrition Services Administrator, Health Education/Fitness Coordinator, School Board Member

• Conduct interviews. Interview script for Nutrition Services Administrators, Interview Script for Health Education/Fitness Curriculum Lead; Interview Script for School Board Member.

• Contact information for district personnel may be found in a table at: School District Contacts

Phase II: Analyze data

Team A Plus 2 new members from Team B:  Policy Quality

·      Changes pre and post legislative mandates: Review 2004 report, Developing and Implementing Surveys to Assess School District Physical Activity and Nutrition Policies,  and the 2004 Summary Report. Select key policy components to compare between 2004 and 2008, and analyze changes.

·      School District characteristics and the strength of district wellness policies: Compare policy scores and sub-scores by % Free and Reduced Price Meals, % non-Hispanic white, city/suburb and small town/rural

·      Prepare preliminary tables and report about major findings about the quality of the policies, changes in policies from 2004 and any associations between district characteristics and policy quality. 

·      Create graphic displays of major findings

Team B:  District Experiences with Policies:  Michael Quinn Patton's book, Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods, is on reserve at the Health Sciences Library, or a personal copy may be borrowed from the instructor.

·      Compile qualitative and quantitative data from interviews

·      Analyze data

·      Prepare preliminary report about what the data mean

Phase III: Prepare Reports and Presentation

Team C:  2-3 Page Briefing Paper for BOH

• Use bullets, bar charts, white space, etc. to make it easy to read

• Content:

• Purpose of evaluation (1 sentence)

• History of wellness policies in King Co. (3 sentences)

•  Major findings from policy abstraction:  describe abstraction tool (one sentence), provide graphic that represents results, 4-5 bullets that highlight major findings

• Comparison of 2004 to 2008 policy findings:  describe 2004 study (one sentence); use graphic method to present comparison findings from 2004-2008, 2-3 bullets with major findings.

• Major findings that emerge from the interviews (paragraph or 7-8 bullets)

•  Limitations of study (one or two sentences)

• Recommendations:  short paragraph or bullets

• Acknowledgments section:  participation by school districts, mentoring of Donna Oberg, Anne Lund, etc.

Team D:  Full report

Team E: 30 minute PowerPoint presentation

• Slides to follow standard rules for professional ppt presentations (not more than 4-5 bullets per page, not more than 2 slides in a row with just words, no distracting templates or auditory/visual effects, not to be read verbatim by presenter, etc.

•  Content to follow that of briefing paper

Timeline

Evaluation

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