An idea for socially responsible children’s books wins $10,000 from ideablob.com

Somerdale, NJ resident Suneet Bhatt is the October winner of ideablob.com’s monthly contest for the best small business idea, as voted on by the ideablob community.

Bhatt’s initiative, Dream Village, is a series of children’s books that describe the true stories of kids who have overcome environmental, economic or social challenges. Each story aims to raise awareness about under-privileged children around the world.

“Dream Village enables child readers to experience the fulfillment that comes from making a difference,” said Bhatt. “We encourage children to make the world a better place in our story telling. For example, the first book tells how the children in a small village in Mozambique helped the village overcome its need for a dependable water source.”

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Study finds that nutritious school lunches can raise math scores.

Does eating right make schoolchildren perform better? A team led by Arthur Agatston, a cardiologist and creator of the popular South Beach diet, presented findings at an Obesity Society meeting over the weekend showing that improving the nutritional quality of school meals bolstered the academic performance of students over a two-year period, in addition to lowering their weight and blood pressure. The researchers saw significant increases in math scores among the 1,197 elementary students who participated in the Healthier Options for Public Schoolchildren obesity prevention program, an intervention currently used in 79 schools in seven states.

The program targets low-income students who qualify for the free or reduced-cost lunch programs run by the federal government. In addition to putting more healthful food choices in the cafeteria, it features a focus on good nutrition through school assemblies, class activities, and by having adults model good eating habits. U.S. News caught up with Agatston to learn more about the connection between nutrition and academic performance.

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Health.com ranks the nation’s healthiest schools based on food and nutrition, fitness and activity, health education, and healthy building materials and practices.

The average American child spends nearly 12,000 hours in school, from kindergarten through 12th grade. That’s a big chunk of time during which he or she can develop good (or bad) health habits.

Happily, schools today are recognizing the many benefits of a healthy head start — and Health magazine recognized the ones that are doing an A+ job. To find the health stars in America’s vast public school universe, they asked education officials in every state for their nominations; they scored those based on how they measured up to some tough criteria (see How they chose their winners), and the semifinalists were ranked by their panel of experts.

Education officials in every state were asked for school nominations based on food and nutrition, fitness and activity, health education, and healthy building materials and practices. We used rigorous criteria from the state of Wisconsin and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation’s Healthy Schools Program framework to score nominees. The top-10 schools were reviewed by our expert panel, and each panelist awarded a score to each top-10 school; these scores were added to each school’s first-round score to yield our final ranking.

Congratulations to all of the inspiring winners!

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A photo essay from the NRDC on school sprawl.

From the NRDC:

Schools used to be the heart of a neighborhood or community.  Children and not a few teachers could walk to class, or to the playground or ball field on the weekend.  This was relatively easy to do, because the schools were placed within, not separated from, their neighborhoods.  They were human-scaled and their architecture was not just utiliatarian, but signaled their importance in the community.  Now it has become hard to tell one from a Walmart or Target.

I was moved to find and show these photos by a couple of things:  First, when our LEED for Neighborhood Development committee met last week, we had a healthy discussion on the subject and adopted some draft revisions to make sure that our standards reward true neighborhood-scaled schools, not sprawling ones.  Second, I noticed a story in the newspaper about a school system in a fast-growing county that was looking at a two hundred and thirty acre site for a new high school.

Sound far-fetched?  A neighborhing county already has a high school on a157-acre site, below.  That, incidentally, is roughly twice the size of Disneyland in California and about half again as large as the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World in Florida.  Here is the school:

Note that the parking lot is larger than the school itself, and about as large as the football and soccer fields combined.

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GreenMap.org expands educational offering for middle and high school teachers and students.

There’s no question that the Internet is the best thing to happen to education since chalk. It is a tool, a medium, a resource, and a teacher unto itself. It helps students to better connect with and learn from the world outside. With sites like GreenMap.org, it’s a way to explore and engage with their local communities, both online and off.

The GreenMap organization, which has been in business since 1995, provides a unique set of online map-making tools that enables one to map out the local green landscape, including parks, businesses, bike lanes, landmarks, and other green-themed points of interest. The organization recently announced a socially driven counterpart to its main product with OpenGreenMap.org. The public launch date has yet to be announced. In the meantime, GreenMap has made a new set of educator tools available just in time for the new school year.

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SocialVibe raises awareness and donations for Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C).

We’ve all heard the saying, “It’s serious as cancer.” The expression is used in many ways. It’s become cliché. But there’s a reason why clichés are formed. Like the universal feeling of being stuck between a rock and a hard place, there’s a deeper truth. In this case, it achieves cliché status because cancer presides over all things serious. It is the king and queen of seriousness. Cancer is deserving of this respect, and yet this tyranny calls for any and all action to overthrow it. To render cancer less serious and eventually not serious at all. That’s essentially what Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) is all about.

Stand Up To Cancer is an initiative aimed at rallying the public around the goal of ending cancer’s reign as a leading cause of death. The initiative brings together an unprecedented collaboration that unites the major television networks, entertainment industry executives, celebrities and prominent leaders in cancer research and patient advocacy. ABC, CBS and NBC will donate one hour of simultaneous commercial-free primetime for a nationally televised fundraising event to air on September 5, 2008 (8 pm EDT and PDT). If you’ve not seen the PSA, it’s nothing short of inspiring:

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Our major transportation arteries are toxic for anyone living or playing near them. Too bad that’s where 1 in 3 public schools are located.

Erin Brockovich fought against one company’s malfeasance in polluting the water of a local town and won. They made a movie about it, and Julia Roberts won an Oscar. This same level of travesty, however, occurs every day around America’s freeways. Unfortunately, the victims can’t file a class-action lawsuit against everyone who drives a car.

A new study finds that one in three U.S. public schools is in an “air pollution danger zone” — within about 1,300 feet from a major highway.

University of Cincinnati researchers have found that more than 30 percent of American public schools are within 400 meters, or a quarter mile, of major highways that consistently serve as main truck and traffic routes.

Research has shown that proximity to major highways—and thus environmental pollutants, such as aerosolizing diesel exhaust particles—can leave school-age children more susceptible to respiratory diseases later in life.

“This is a major public health concern that should be given serious consideration in future urban development, transportation planning and environmental policies,” says Sergey Grinshpun, PhD, principal investigator of the study and professor of environmental health at UC.

To protect the health of young children with developing lungs, he says new schools should be built further from major highways.

“Health risk can be mitigated through proper urban planning, but that doesn’t erase the immediate risk to school-age children attending schools that are too close to highways right now,” he adds. “Existing schools should be retrofitted with air filtration systems that will reduce students’ exposure to traffic pollutants.”

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A new report urges the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to support laws that restrict junk-food advertising to kids online. Is this a solution or scapegoating?

Business Week reports on action taken by Children Now to restrict junk-food advertising to kids online.

Having successfully lobbied the government to place limits on junk food ads on TV, they now target marketing to kids via the Web. “While there are some rules for TV, there are no rules when you move online,” says Patti Miller, vice-president of children’s advocacy group Children Now and a member of the Federal Communications Commission’s Task Force on Media & Childhood Obesity. “We don’t want to reduce junk food advertising to kids [on TV] and then find that it has just moved to another platform.”

The worry is that food companies are bombarding kids with ads for non-nutritious foods, fueling the obesity epidemic that, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, has increased the proportion of overweight kids under age 12 fivefold in the last generation and left almost 19% of kids between 6 and 11 overweight.

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Elizabeth Dehart is striving to eliminate obesity in the classroom; ideablob’s $10,000 prize will help her start a vending company that provides organic snacks to school kids.

Advanta Corp. announced today that Elizabeth Dehart of West Jordan, Utah, is the July winner of Ideablob.com’s monthly contest for the best small business idea, as voted on by the ideablob community.

Dehart’s venture, Healthy Vending Solutions, seeks to offer children healthy, organic food options by making them available in school vending machines. Her initial goal is for kids to have access to healthy food alternatives in Salt Lake City area schools, and she hopes to expand the healthy vending machine concept to airports and hospitals throughout Utah and beyond.

“Have you ever been somewhere where your food choices were confined to starchy, fatty or sugary foods, when what you really want is a piece of fruit or something healthy?” asked Dehart. “That’s the problem I’m trying to solve. I would love for people – especially kids – to have healthy choices.”

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UK-based Persil, a Unilever brand, emphasizes the importance of childhood play.

Childhood as we know it is over and children of future generations could enter adulthood lacking vital life and social skills because of a lack of ‘free’ play, according to a study released by Persil.

The global report, which marks the launch of Persil’s Every Child Has The Right campaign, was conducted in conjunction with leading experts in youth development and highlights the erosion of childhood. The report found 85% of UK mums are concerned that children are growing up too quickly and 64% believe children are being deprived of childhood through the lack of free play.

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