The Boulder Valley School District Health Education Program provides comprehensive, skills-based, age appropriate classroom instruction that addresses the physical, mental, emotional and social dimensions of health. It is designed to motivate and assist students to maintain and improve their health, prevent disease and reduce health-related risk behaviors both while in school, and throughout their lives.
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What Health Curriculum and Standards are Taught in BVSD?
Since no Health Education standards have been adopted in Colorado, BVSD adopted the National Health Education standards in 2004 to serve as the foundation in developing a K-12 comprehensive health education curriculum. The Health curriculum is grounded in the bodies of both sound education and public health research, framed by health behavior theory and was developed over three years through an extensive community-input process.
BVSD's curriculum teaches skills through standards 2-7:
how to effectively access resources,
practice healthy behaviors,
analyze personal and societal influences,
communicate effectively about health issues,
set goals and make health-related decisions, and
advocate for self, family, friends and community.
Through these skills, students acquire functional health knowledge (standard 1) about:
- mental and emotional health,
- violence awareness,
- substance prevention,
- human growth and development and human sexuality,
- nutrition and fitness,
- disease prevention,
- diversity awareness,
- injury prevention and safety and more.
For more information about BVSD's Health Education standards, click here. |
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- Secondary Health teachers are asked to have a minimum of 90 hours of professional development in Health Education.
- 5th grade classroom teachers receive mandatory training before teaching the puberty unit.
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Secondary:
- one quarter in 7th grade,
- one quarter in 8th grade
- one semester in 10th grades
Elementary:
No delivery time has been allocated for the elementary level with the exception of a short unit on human growth and development in the 5th grade (with a focus on physical, emotional, mental and social changes during puberty). |
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Consistent with best practice protocol, BVSD’s Health Education Program works collaboratively with the seven other Coordinated School Health (CSH) component areas to ensure all students achieve academically by increasing learning capacity and reducing absenteeism. To learn more about this initiative, click here. |
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