Schools and youth programs can reduce health problems in children by giving them tools to overcome poverty and to build a positive sense of their futures, an Alameda County health official told a gathering of school, police and social service people Thursday.
Tony Iton, director of the Alameda County Department of Public Health, presented a study that for the first time drew a connection between school performance and public health needs. According to officials, the city of Alameda could become a model for the rest of the country as it tries to deal with health by addressing school issues.
“Ninety percent of the dollars we spend to heal people, that’s only part of the picture,” Alameda County Supervisor Alice Lai-Bitker said. “There’s so much other things we can do and it’s going to make a lot more difference in terms of people’s health.”
Iton spoke on existing problems in health care, including disparities among ethnicities. Overall, the city of Alameda is aligned with the county average in terms of mortality and health for all groups
According to the presentation, health problems are related to poverty. But they also seems to be related to children’s perception of their futures and how well they perform in schools, according to Iton. Officials want to focus their efforts in that area to lessen disparity.
“The goal is not eradicating poverty, but to see the things we can do today, together that protects kids against the influences of poverty,” Iton said. “We can build assets that can help protect from serious long-term consequences of poverty, including better health outcomes, including better criminal justice outcomes, including better social services outcomes.”
Alameda provides the perfect place to test this hypothesis, according to Iton, because children in its schools seem to have higher resiliency to poverty. For example, Washington Elementary Schoolhas a poverty level of 64 percent (cq). Meanwhile students at the school also had a “high perception of assets,” meaning higher career and academic expectations, opportunity for civic engagement and caring relationships with adults, Iton said.
The presentation was part of an effort starting last spring to look at how to address public health issues by putting together data from various agencies and studying how they relate to one another, according to Lai-Bitker. It is also part of the Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative that calls for collaboration between regional public health directors and local leaders.
Participants at the meeting said the next step would be to talk to more agencies and groups around the community to draft more specific actions.
“This is a health issue, any issue we deal with our kids in ‘traditional law enforcement’ is an outcome of the system itself,” said Walter Tibbet, police chief for Alameda. “It is really exciting and encouraging to see us taking a more systematic approach to addressing the issues that we see as opposed to a reactive approach.”
Filed under: Health
