César Chávez Elementary hosted the Muévete Health Fair last Saturday to help educate both students and their families how to maintain optimum healthfulness.
To help families increase their awareness to healthfulness the fair hosted a variety of workshops put on by local high school students on subjects including the correct daily proportions of food groups in meals. Other workshops showcased some basic exercises as well as a hands-on session where kids got to make trail mix from scratch as an alternative to the more common sugar laden snacks more widely available.
“The crux of the situation is that a student cannot perform well academically if they are not healthy,” said Carlo Solis the Community School Coordinator at the school.
The fair also teamed up with a variety of local medical organizations including UCSF, SF General Hospital and SFSU to perform Body Mass Indexing or BMI to give kids and their parents a sense of their weight as a function of their height to get a rough idea if they are overweight or not. UCSF also administered free flu shots and SFGH talked to families about interpreting the nutritional information on food products.
“By hosting this fair families don’t feel overburdened by having to go outside of their neighborhood to receive the health resources they need but rather those resources come to them,” said Solis.
For a former student at César Chávez Elementary, Jacqueline Barbeau, 48, who also put her daughter through the program and currently has two of her six grandkids already attending classes and more on the way, the school is a fixture in the community that provides a variety of functions including coalescing the community.
“I enjoyed the fair because I have two grandkids that are coming here next year so am happy to show them what this school is all about including this great outreach with the community,” said Barbeau.