Health & Wellness
The LA Promise Fund believes that healthy students are successful students. With the Mark Ridley Thomas Wellness Center at Manual Arts High School as our anchor, the LA Promise Fund and its many dedicated partners provide information, services, and healthy opportunities to all students and families in our network of schools.
School Fuel
In parallel, our School Fuel initiative strives to promote a healthy, nutritious breakfast for all public school students in LA County. To date, School Fuel has facilitated Breakfast in the Classroom, parent engagement, and nutrition education in partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and launched Breakfast pilot programs in neighboring districts with its partner Share Our Strength/No Kid Hungry.
Breakfast in the Classroom, now implemented by LAUSD, has been made available to over 500,000 students at over 650 schools in LAUSD. In 2018, School Fuel will launch universal breakfast in the classroom at its charter school network and offer technical knowledge to other charter school operators throughout the county who wish to follow suit.
School Gardens
There is evidence to indicate that active learning in less structured, participatory spaces like school gardens is more likely to transform children’s food attitudes and habits, and that school gardening, especially when combined with a healthy school meal program and nutritional education, encourages more healthful food choices. Working with supportive partners like the American Heart Association’s Teaching Gardens program, Tree People, the Whole Kids Foundation, and the California Fertilizer Foundation, we are able to maintain thriving school gardens at the majority of our campuses year round and engage students and teachers in subjects that range from culinary arts to environmental science to the chemistry involved in the successful maintenance and harvest of healthy fruits and vegetables.
Mobile Clinics on Campus
Our schools are community schools and thus are hubs for vital services the community needs. We work with partners such as St. John’s Well Child and Family Center and Vision to Learn to bring health screenings and vaccination clinics to families and vision screening and free glasses to students on all of our campuses.
Social-Emotional Health and Learning
We believe in the concept of educating the “whole child.” To that end, we ensure that our students have access to licensed mental health professionals, that our teachers have access to social emotional learning opportunities such as mindfulness, trauma-informed schools, and restorative practices, and that members of our school community can develop resilience and coping skills to best navigate life.
