Last school year was filled with great programs working to fulfill Social Health Association’s goal of empowering youth to lead happy, healthy and safe lives. During the 2016/17 school year, SHA’s professional Health Educators served just over 28,000 students across Indiana – equating to a total of 71,687 educational hours!
The majority of educational hours were concentrated in delivering Making A Difference!™ to 7th and 8th grade youth. SHA’s CDC endorsed Making A Difference!™ program focuses on preventing teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. In addition to our regular programs, SHA also launched a new 3-year research partnership with IU School of Medicine and our Human Growth & Development curriculum was reviewed for medical accuracy by the Director of Adolescent Medicine for the IU Shcool of Medicine – ensuring that we maintain the highest level of accuracy in our programming!
SHA not only provides programming for kids, but also makes educating parents and other trusted adults a priority so that they can continue to be resources for their children. This summer, we launched the first-ever online parent introductions for 4th-7th grade programs, including transcripts in Spanish and Burmese.
Feedback received from partner schools and teachers on SHA programs and educators was overwhelmingly positive. Program partners rate our educators’ performance at 98%! Over 90% of classroom teachers gave SHA an ‘A+ rating’ on:
- Relevance to Students’ Needs
- Overall Quality of Program
- Ability to Engage Students
- Ability to Relate to Students
- Overall Quality of Presenter
This school year, Social Health Association has a goal of delivering a total of 80,500 educational hours – increasing the number of schools that receive Making A Difference!™ programming. During the 2017/18 school year, SHA programs will include puberty education with Human Growth & Development, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease prevention with Making A Difference!™, Step Up for Kindness!™ bullying and peer violence prevention and healthy teen dating relationship programming through CARE™ – Communicating with And Respecting Each other.
We’ll continue to offer training to our staff by subject matter experts in order to deliver the best possible content to our youth. Additionally, SHA plans to offer TrustEd Adults lunch-n-learn workshops with our program, “Cyber Safe in Cyber Space” for continued opportunities to engage adults as well as youth.