The Kentucky Department of Education is working with school districts to improve health outcomes, which they say directly affects success in the classroom.

The school health branch develops and shares best practices in areas of nutrition and physical activity.

They say focusing on student health directly affects their chance of success in the classroom.

More about this issue and tonight's Education Matters report.

I think it's no secret that our students, unfortunately, are not coming to school healthier.

Unfortunately, many of them have not only chronic, but some have acute conditions that we want to make sure that our students can can be in school and can learn.

But with that comes added responsibility and added opportunities that we need to always keep on the radar screen.

So School Health Branch was created June of 2023.

So we serve all 171 districts across the state and really look at what we can do to improve student health.

We are on a five year cooperative agreement with CDC to really impact student health.

So, for example, physical activity and physical education.

So while we understand that there is a limited amount of time that students have physical education in their school, we understand that physical activity and movement is essential not only for our students, but for us as adults, sitting for 6 hours and not being able to physically move around is is not only detrimental to learning, but research shows that that movement is very beneficial and other ways of retaining information and being able to perform academically.

So that piece providing quality nutrition opportunity for students not only within the school building but within their communities so they can seek that out, helping students manage chronic conditions so that students who have asthma, their students who are diabetics or obese, helping them to understand what it means to manage that on a daily basis.

So when they leave a school setting, they can handle their A given situation and and be able to not move in in the negative direction of the complications of those diseases.

Ultimately, what I see as a success is that districts are truly looking out for not only the health, health of the kids and not only the education and the achievement of the kids, but not separating those two.

So really helping districts understand that we want our students to be successful and as a result, we need to work together and address the whole child.

This Goal Health branch also works for the other divisions in the department to focus on the education programs and policies associated with the mental health of the students.