When the federal Child Nutrition and Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Reauthorization Act passed in 2004, it became crunch time for schools across the country. The law required all public schools to evaluate their nutrition and exercise programs and establish new, effective student wellness policies by the 2006–2007 school year.

Amidst the worry that ensued, Stacey Snelling recognized a timely—but golden—opportunity: What if AU’s health promotion management graduate students worked with local districts to evaluate the efficacy of their current nutrition and exercise plans? For the communities involved, it would mean program evaluations conducted by skilled volunteers; for the students, it would provide valuable work experience in a nascent area of health policy promotion. “It was a community service opportunity that would also provide students with really cutting-edge research projects,” says Snelling, who teaches in the School of Education, Teaching, and Health (SETH) and has directed SETH’s undergraduate program in health promotion management since 1997.

Arlington County was the first to sign on. In 2005, Snelling and Casey Korba (MS health promotion management ’05) went into three Arlington high schools to answer two questions: What types of foods were offered in the schools’ cafeterias, and which ones were students actually buying?

The results were alarming on both counts. While foods associated with the national school lunch program conformed to nutrition standards by law, these traditional meals accounted for only a small portion of sales. Most kids were buying “competitive foods”—a la carte items that are responsible for a growing amount of school revenue and are not held to the same stringent federal nutrition standards. Most of these foods were low in nutritional value and high in calories and fat—and, says Snelling, “that’s what the kids were going for.”

“We had a hypothesis that competitive foods are diluting the nutritional value of the lunch program,” adds Korba. “What was surprising was just how bad it actually was.”

In addition to providing Arlington schools with quantitative data on what their students were consuming at lunch, Snelling

and Korba also advised the schools to work with vendors to decrease the amount of unhealthy competitive food offerings and increase the healthy ones. Their research and recommendations were published in the American School Health Association’s Journal of School Health in December 2007.

“For me, the biggest lesson was that the schools are doing this because their hands are really tied,” says Korba. “The competitive foods are bringing in a lot of revenue [that the schools need]. We sit in our classrooms and read about these theories and talk about how we’re going to change the world, but it’s more complex than that. Having this experience in the real world gave me an opportunity to see how to make change and why it’s so hard to do.”

The project also provided a springboard for follow-up thesis work by other graduate students in the program. Currently, Teha Kennard and Jennifer Yezek (both MS health promotion management ’08) are making subsequent wellness program recommendations and conducting follow-up evaluations to determine how much better kids’ diets are as a result of the reauthorization bill’s implementation. In addition, Nicole Reynolds (MS health promotion management ’08) began working with Snelling to investigate physical activity patterns among middle and high school students in D.C. Public Schools.

These projects are the most recent examples of the health promotion management program’s long-standing philosophies being put into action. “When we started the MS program in 1980, the idea was that we would also provide a realworld experience to complement the classroom setting,” says Bob Karch, director of the health promotion management master’s program. “Snelling’s work is an example of how we try to get students involved in real-life experiences.”

At a time when childhood obesity in America is increasing, it’s also a project of acute relevance. “The habits of middle and high school students are likely to stay with them as adults,” says Snelling. “When you look at that, forming healthy habits and maintaining health at an early age is essential.”