Westmount's Health and Wellness Committee has made some exciting and interesting advances.  Our committee work is based upon a community development model and thus has many partners.  Our guiding factors to improve our community’s health and wellness involve focused improvements in three main areas:
- Active living (AL)
- Healthy eating (HE) and
- Positive social environments (PSE).  

We used recommendations from Alberta Health and Wellness to develop our plan and applied for a grant from the Alberta Healthy School Community Wellness Fund.  This is a competitive grant that helps schools from both financial and organizational perspectives.  We just received notice that our grant application was successful and we have been awarded $10,000.  The grant application involves the integration of Adventure Education (AE) and Outdoor Education/Environmental (OEE) programs into our school to help reduce our hypoactive population while improving social and emotional health.  Our partners to help realize our short-term and long-term objectives includes the Eco tourism and Outdoor Leadership Applied Degree at Mount Royal University, Ever Active Schools, University of Calgary Centre for Gifted Education, YMCA, Oilfield High School, Alberta Health Services (Calgary Zone) and Outward Bound Canada.  These exciting new partnerships with our funding will help begin our new direction that will support Westmount’s effort to enhance our affective curriculum support. 

The next step in this process was the gathering of parent support to help organize an Eco-Symposium that involves all the above mentioned partners.  Thank You to everyone who participated in Westmount's first annual E3 Symposium! Held on November 20th, 2009, this symposium on Exploring Experiential Education, was a day-long event for Teachers and grade 9-12 Student leaders.

Our newest initiative is a "Healthy Lunch Partnership" which will be designed to provide great tasting healthy lunches to our school while supporting our community partners. "Prairie House Deli" now comes to the school from Monday to Thursday to provide lunch on a cash, pay-per-item basis for mid-high students and Westmount staff. We regret that our long-standing partnership with "Yummy Lunches" has been temporarily discontinued - once the vendor is available to provide this service again we will notify the school community.

31 August 2010

Health & Wellness Links

Westmount athletics

Mount Royal University: Eco Tourism and Outdoor Leadership

Ever Active Schools

U of C Centre for Gifted Education

YMCA

Oilfields High School

Alberta Health Services (Calgary)

Outward Bound

about H1N1/seasonal flu and Influenza-Like Illness (ILI):

- Alberta Health and Wellness web page and FAQ sheet
- Alberta Health Services web page
- Public Health Agency of Canada web page: "FightFlu.ca"
- Health Link Alberta web page
(or phone 403.943.5465
in Calgary Region)