Healthy high, healthy choices

SWIFT Program Manager Olga Duchicela, M.D., and Stanzel Foundation Program Director Cyndy Reed work to bring volunteers together for Healthy High/Healthy Choices events at area schools.

The construction of a model airplane starts with an idea. The idea develops into an engineered prototype, and careful design and craftsmanship carries it to the final product, which constantly evolves for the benefit of the purchaser. For Victor and Joseph Stanzel, natives of Schulenburg, Texas, these principles not only comprised the brothers’ successful model airplane business, but would also inspire the Stanzel Family Foundation to develop a plan to support their entire community and provide for its future.

Called the Healthy Community Initiative, the Stanzel Foundation Board of Directors partnered with the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Rural Public Health to identify three areas in the communities of Schulenburg and neighboring town Weimar on which to focus—youth health, emergency care and the elderly, says Stanzel Foundation Board President Bob Stanzel. They set teams into action in 2000. By 2003, the Foundation Board had identified a group of citizens to comprise SWIFT, or Schulenburg Weimar In Focus Together, a community-based program that unites volunteers in the two rural central Texas towns and supports any project of benefit to the surrounding 10,000 residents.

“When SWIFT came to be created, the Stanzel Foundation wanted both communities to be enriched and wanted the group to be responsible for looking after the communities,” says Olga Duchicela, M.D., who along with Jorge Duchicela, M.D., and Robert Youens, M.D., contributes largely to the health and wellness component of SWIFT. “The Foundation wanted both communities to have wings of their own.”

Olga Duchicela serves as SWIFT’s program manager, using her experience as a physician to teach lessons on obesity, heart health and nutrition in local schools as part of the Healthy High/Healthy Choices program. Volunteers coordinate 12 events each year in four area schools to instill healthy habits in students grades K-12. She was awarded TAFP’s Public Health Award in 2005 for her work with the program.

TAFP member Olga Duchicela, M.D., explains to a class of St. Rose students how obesity can hurt a person’s heart and brain.

During a typical Healthy High/Healthy Choices day, the students participate in a group physical activity; a wellness assessment measuring height, weight, body mass index and blood pressure; and educational programs on common disorders, self-esteem and good exercise habits. Healthy High/Healthy Choices currently reaches 3,000 youth and adults in the two communities and has been well received by teachers, administrators and students, says Stanzel Foundation Program Director Cyndy Reed.

“[The students] definitely have a different attitude of what’s healthy and what’s acceptable,” she says. “The schools have picked up on it, too.”

Reed says she has seen a tremendous change in the students. She recalls an instance when SWIFT volunteers were conducting focus groups with the students for feedback on Healthy High/Healthy Choices. “A third-grader walked in with her notes in hand, her concern was inactivity in her family,” Reed says. “She asked how she could promote activity in her parents and sister.”

Pam Wick, a third-grade teacher at St. Rose of Lima Catholic School in Schulenburg agrees the program is making a difference among the students. “I wish they could do it once a month, especially the physical part, and the nutrition part, too,” Wick says. “[The students] look forward to it.”

To further target health and education initiatives, SWIFT uses funding and volunteers from the Stanzel Foundation and outside grants to assist established programs that “empower access to the communities’ assets.” OneStar Foundation, a state agency that supports service and volunteerism throughout Texas and works with the national corps of volunteers AmeriCorps, recently awarded a grant to SWIFT that has allowed the group to “take a quantum leap forward,” SWIFT Executive Director Sylvan Rossi says.

Victoria College vocational nursing student Joey Padilla checks a student’s blood pressure during the Healthy High/Healthy Choices wellness exam.

“SWIFT provides people resources through its AmeriCorps programs to build the capacity of these organizations in tutoring, mentoring, parenting and health promotion,” Rossi says. “It also provides organizational, planning and some financial resources.”

Two initiatives SWIFT supports with the help of AmeriCorps volunteers are the local chapters of the national programs Parents As Teachers and Boys & Girls Clubs.

The Schulenburg/Weimar-area Parents As Teachers program connects new parents of children up to age 5 with resources in the community. These can include periodic individual meetings between parents and early childhood development educators, developmental screenings for children by local physicians, or group meetings for parents on topics such as safety or sharing. During each of these, parents learn strategies for enhancing their child’s development and school readiness.

“The importance is to adapt and make it flexible for each community,” PAT Coordinator Lucy Stanzel says about the program. “Parents As Teachers is a family support group that aims to enhance child achievement and school success.”

Through this national program, participating parents receive strategies for positive discipline, money management, engagement with the child’s school and family literary practices, each of which is grounded in a set curriculum. Follow-up support for parents through PAT continues until the child reaches 3rd grade. SWIFT volunteers plan to implement a separate parenting involvement program for parents of children grades K-5, eventually expanding services through 12th grade.

Boys & Girls Clubs of Champion Valley receive AmeriCorps tutors for children grades K-5. Twelve tutors start working with children in four elementary schools during school hours and continue tutoring them in the clubs after school.

“There has been a difference in the kids,” says Mike Olle, Schulenburg Unit Director for Boys & Girls Clubs. “They work with the tutors in school and after, so the tutors already know the kids. It’s an extra hand, we get so much more done.”

Boys & Girls Clubs provide a place for children ages 6-18 to go after school and on weekends where they can interact with their peers, youth development staff and volunteers. They can participate in programs focusing on character and leadership; education and careers; health and life skills; the arts, sports and fitness, and others. Olle and the Boys & Girls Club staff, however, “make sure they get homework done first” with the help of AmeriCorps tutors.

St. Rose students grades 1-4 gather around a play parachute after completing a vigorous Healthy High/Healthy Choices obstacle course.

Jorge Duchicela, chair of the SWIFT board of directors, says the board chose to assist established programs in the communities that have been proven to be helpful to Schulenburg and Weimar.

“We capitalize on assets our community has,” he says. “Both communities have many assets and what we want to do is preserve them and make them better, enhance their ability to do what they do best.”

In the future, SWIFT plans to continue building their programs. Using collected health data from Healthy High/Healthy Choices, SWIFT has partnered with the Texas Tech University Health Science Center Institute for Rural and Community Health and will launch a database for school nurses and a Web-based network of health promotion reinforcement programs for adults. These two steps will lead the groups to publish articles on their findings and host a meeting among other Texas universities “to show what a small rural area can do for itself given some ambition, a plan, someone to champion various program elements and just a reasonable amount of initial funding,” says Rossi.

Jorge Duchicela hopes the data will further legitimize the work that SWIFT is doing. “The challenge is to make it from a short-term contribution to a long-term contribution,” he says. “With scientific validation, that helps with efficacy.”

Achieving positive, long-term change for residents in the areas of education and health allows SWIFT to stay true to the goals of Joseph and Victor Stanzel. “They’re making strides, making changes that will affect the families,” Bob Stanzel says. “All of the work with Parents As Teachers, Boys & Girls Clubs and Healthy High/Healthy Choices confirms that we’re on track.”