The Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child Model: A New Approach for Improving Educational Attainment and Healthy Development for Students

The Whole Child approach and the coordinated school health (CSH) approach both address the physical and emotional needs of students. However, a unified approach acceptable to both the health and education communities is needed to assure that students are healthy and ready to learn.

During spring 2013, the ASCD (formerly known as the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) convened experts from the field of education and health to discuss lessons learned from implementation of the CSH and Whole Child approaches and to explore the development of a new model that would incorporate the knowledge gained through implementation to date.