Center for Minority Health to be Featured During WPXI-TV Special
Broadcast will focus on Healthy Class of 2010 ProgramUPMC Media Relations
February 21, 2008
The Center for Minority Health (CMH) at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH), will be featured in a WPXI-TV half-hour special entitled, “Here’s to Life.” The Black History Month special will air on WPXI-TV at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 23 and will be rebroadcast on PCNC at 3:00 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 24 and again at 7:30 p.m., Monday, Feb. 25. The special will focus on the Healthy Class of 2010 project, a seven-year campaign designed to promote the health and well-being of students in the Pittsburgh Public Schools.
Stephen Thomas, Ph.D., director of the CMH and Dr. James Butler, project director of the Healthy Class of 2010 project, examine solutions aimed at bringing childhood obesity levels down from epidemic proportions. “One of the major problems is that many African-American children live in food deserts,” said Dr. Thomas. “Access to fresh foods and full-service stores are in limited supply or do not exist at all in their neighborhoods. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon, for many kids to have their breakfast come from the local gas station, and the long-term consequences are now becoming evident with an epidemic of Type 2 diabetes among children.”
“It is noteworthy that every high school in the system is fully engaged with the effort to transform their schools to promote health and prevent disease using the Comprehensive School Health Index developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” said Dr. Butler.
Professional athletes such as Olympic gold medalist Roger Kingdom and Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Charlie Batch share their own wellness techniques with grade school and college level students. The special also will feature interviews with students from Pittsburgh Public Schools as well as commentary from Mark Roosevelt, Superintendent of Pittsburgh Public Schools and Carmen Anderson of the Heinz Endowment, the primary funder for the project since it was launched.
Initiated in the 2003-2004 academic year, the goals of the Healthy Class of 2010 program are to enable staff to systematically engage every student who entered sixth grade in 2003 in active living and to increase students’ knowledge, attitudes and healthy choices regarding physical activity, nutrition and a tobacco-free lifestyle. Working in partnership with the Pittsburgh Public Schools and the Allegheny County Health Department, program staff at GSPH tracks students’ progress toward achieving these goals over a seven-year period, through their graduation in 2010. Importantly, their graduation date coincides with the deadline set for Healthy People 2010, the nation’s health promotion and disease prevention agenda, making the implementation of this program particularly opportune. The CMH’s goal is for the class of 2010 to be the healthiest group of students to ever graduate from the Pittsburgh Public Schools.
CMH was established in 1994 with a grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation and is committed to taking a leading role in the nation’s prevention agenda to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities as described in Healthy People 2010, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services initiative. Details about the other CMH activities can be viewed on the CMH Web site at http://www.cmh.pitt.edu .
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