MCW’s Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment awards more than $250,000 to increase fitness in Milwaukee children
(Milwaukee) – The Medical College of Wisconsin’s (MCW) Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment awarded more than $250,000 over three years to provide additional physical education (PE) support to Milwaukee Public School (MPS) students, resulting in increased fitness and creating an orientation to lifetime fitness.
MPS, the largest school district in Wisconsin, which serves children as young as age three up through grade 12, is the lead community partner on the award. The school system will work with David Nelson, PhD, MS, associate professor, family and community medicine at MCW. The project team will also collaborate with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee (BGCGM), Marquette University, and the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association.
MPS FITNESSGRAM® data, a health-related fitness assessment tool used nationwide, shows that 17.4 percent of students tested did not score in the healthy fitness zones for all six assessments. This illustrates a great need for additional support and interventions to a targeted group of students to change their perceptions of physical literacy and improve fitness levels now and into the future.
The project partners will address healthy fitness levels and orient youth to lifetime fitness through the implementation and adoption of Response to Intervention (RtI) in PE in MPS and BGCGM clubs. The RtI framework systematically and comprehensively provides differing levels of support based on student responsiveness to instruction and intervention in academics and behavior. An RtI process for high school physical education will be developed that screens and identifies students who will participate in additional after school fitness activities at the BGCGM. This process will help students develop an orientation to lifetime fitness and will improve current fitness levels.
The program will follow MPS’s RtI structure and a model that already exist for math, literacy and behavior. At the end of the three-year funding period, the Milwaukee youth fitness project will impact 75 percent of MPS high schools, 15,400 students annually, and the partner will have created a scalable framework that can be adopted to the needs of additional area schools or clubs.
About the Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment
The Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment works to catalyze health improvement in Wisconsin and was created by funds generated from Blue Cross & Blue Shield United of Wisconsin’s conversion to a for-profit corporation. The Endowment’s Healthier Wisconsin Partnership Program funded the new awards as part of its continued work supporting partnerships between academics and community health and non-profit organizations for urban, rural and statewide health improvement projects in Wisconsin.
Since 2004, the Healthier Wisconsin Partnership Program has invested more than $50 million in 169 community-academic health improvement projects. More information on individual projects is available online: http://www.mcw.edu/Advancing-
About the Medical College of Wisconsin
The Medical College of Wisconsin is the state’s only private medical school and health sciences graduate school. Founded in 1893, it is dedicated to leadership and excellence in education, patient care, research and community engagement. More than 1,200 students are enrolled in MCW’s medical school and graduate school programs in Milwaukee, and 26 medical students are enrolled at MCW-Green Bay. A regional medical education campus is scheduled to open in Central Wisconsin in 2016. MCW’s School of Pharmacy will open in 2017 or 2018 with an initial class size of 60 students. A major national research center, MCW is the largest research institution in the Milwaukee metro area and second largest in Wisconsin. In FY 2013-14, faculty received approximately $154 million in external support for research, teaching, training and related purposes, of which approximately $138 million is for research. This total includes highly competitive research and training awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Annually, MCW faculty direct or collaborate on more than 2,000 research studies, including clinical trials. Additionally, more than 1,350 physicians provide care in virtually every specialty of medicine for more than 425,000 patients annually.
