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Southern Door Awarded Major Health, Wellness Grant

The Southern Door School District was one of three in the state and 60 in the nation to be awarded major grants under the Carol M. White Physical Education Program (PEP). The U.S. Department of Education awarded 60 grants totaling nearly $32 million, including $461,590 for Southern Door. The Monroe and Wild Rose school districts also received grants.

“The Physical Education Dept. was very excited about it because they spent quite a bit of time, along with members of our Health & Wellness team, starting last fall and going through the winter, actually gathering baseline assessments of where students were in certain areas of health, wellness and fitness,” said Southern Door Superintendent Patricia Vickman, who added that the grant covers a three-year period, with the bulk of the funds coming in the first year.

“The grant itself is primarily focused on bringing life skills for health, wellness and fitness into the physical education curriculum at the school,” she said. “Wellness will be a new part of our physical education program. We have separate health classes, but our physical education curriculum was pretty traditional in that it basically focused on skill acquisitions, and the best practice now in physical education is to incorporate social, emotional and physical wellness into your physical education curriculum.”

In other communities that have been awarded a PEP grant, the effects of the program often spill out into the larger community.

“That’s what we’re hoping for, especially with Southern Door being the focal point of the Southern Door community,” Vickman said. “We do have a lot of families, parents and community residents that come to this as the hub of learning and activity. Last year we opened our fitness center to community residents. That is also a portion of this grant, that you are impacting students first, families second, but you’re also impacting your community.”

Vickman said some grant money will be spent on equipment such as pedometers, heart monitors and software programs for students to monitor their own fitness levels, “but for us a large part of the grant is in professional development and selecting the curriculum that is going to help us meet our goals.”

The grant will be co-directed by physical education teacher Justin Tlachac and 5th grade teacher Marc Vandenhouten.

“We’re at a little bit of a standstill right now with the government shutdown,” Vickman said. “We thought we would have communication with our department by now as far as training in Washington, DC. The co-directors of the grant need to go out to DC for training.”