The Sonoma County Asthma Coalition began work on our CAFA school related objective in June 2006. Our objective is to work with a minimum of three local school districts in order to institutionalize the use of environmental asthma trigger reduction strategies at school sites. Our original intent was to focus primarily on indoor air quality issues.
We identified three school districts based on high asthma rates in those districts as well as the helpful fact that coalition staff had well established relationships with school personnel in these districts from previous prevention related activities.
We were able to contact the school superintendents during the relatively quiet summer months, and set up meetings with them in September at the start of school year. Just as we were launching into our discussions with them about our proposal to offer resources in assessing and addressing air quality issues in classrooms, we received an urgent call from the national office of the American Lung Association. The call was from the office of the Asthma Friendly Schools Initiative (AFSI) grant officer, requesting us to submit an application for the grant, as they had not received sufficient applications from California and had money to burn! We had successfully implemented an AFSI grant funded program in 2004 and so they called us first. We were able to submit a grant to them with a turn around time of a week, and were informed that we had been funded a week later.
This AFSI grant offers resources which made it possible for us to hire a subcontractor for a few hours a week to work with us on implementing our objectives at our three districts. It also provided us with the impetus to expand our objectives to include the implementation of additional asthma management strategies.
We were fortunate to have an ideal candidate for the contractor position. We were in a meeting with the Guerneville School principal, discussing the new AFSI grant, when we mentioned the consultant position. The principal said she had just met with a school parent who was a currently unemployed occupational nurse who wanted to help out at the school. We interviewed the candidate and it was a perfect fit!
We then identified all the partners that we thought should be included in the project, and contacted school administrators, school nurses and health techs, P.E. teachers, school Trustees, local medical and social service providers, asthma coalition schools committee members, and other community members interested in clean air and asthma issues. We held the kick off meeting of the West County Asthma Team in the Hospitality Room of the El Molino High School Culinary Academy on December 12, 2006 with good representation from all the partners.
Since then, we have not looked back. Coalition staff attended the Asthma Friendly Schools training in November and came back with the usual cargo of large spiral notebooks, one of which contained a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) needs assessment tool called the “School Health Index” (SHI). An advantage of the tool is that data can be recorded online. The software then produces an automatic report that both crunches the data and produces a format by which to prioritize needs and develop a plan based on the data results. We proposed use of this tool to the West County Asthma Team to conduct our needs assessment of health service delivery for students with asthma. The team agreed that it would meet our needs. The high school district is particularly interested in how the tool works, as they will be conducting a comprehensive school health assessment in the near future, and may decide to use the SHI if our pilot project finds it to be effective.
In January, we conducted trainings on how to use the SHI tool with the team, and began conducting the assessment at all three school districts in February. We plan on completing the school health assessments at the three districts by the end of April through individual or group meetings with school staff, and by conducting focus groups with students with asthma, and parents of students with asthma. In May, we will conduct a half day meeting with the team to compile a rough analysis of the needs assessment and use the findings to develop appropriate asthma interventions to implement at the school sites over the next three years. From June to August we will compile the results and proposed interventions into a strategic plan. We will also develop a handsome report with the help of technical assistance from the Public Media Center. The finalized report will be printed in August and distributed to the school community in September in time for Back to School nights.
One of the biggest lessons learned for us in this endeavor is to take the time to build a solid relationship with the schools. Conducting a comprehensive needs assessment with our West County Asthma Team has included team members in the process and provided all of us with a clearer picture not only of asthma issues, but of school health service systems in general. The process has resulted in the team taking responsibility and ownership of the project. We would have been less effective if our focus had remained exclusively on indoor air quality in classrooms. Through the resources provided by the AFSI grant, we were able to broaden the scope of the project to encompass asthma management at the schools, including paying attention to asthma triggers in the classrooms. As a result, we are gaining stronger advocates and allies in the schools, which will strengthen our ability to meet our goal of institutionalizing the use of environmental reduction strategies in these districts.
Shan Magnuson, Asthma Project Director
Barbara Young, Associate Project Director
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