Designing Inclusive Schools: Embedding Health, Wellness, and Community in Educational Facilities

Room: 214
Time: 1:30pm – 2:30pm

Attend this session to engage in several actionable planning aspects and tools for creating educational environments that enhance health and wellness, resiliency and build community. Our session topics are keenly focused on end-users at the margins for whom education, and life, may be atypical and seeks to share tools that address the needs of the users and how we can serve them better.
Our session is focused on sharing successful and established programs and tools that relate to next and best practices in Community Schools and Educational Visioning in the share of Redwood City School Districts Community Schools and Family Centers, USC/LAUSD “Little Yogini’s” program. Our session shares the student and community-based discovery process that embeds health, wellness and inclusion into the process.

As stewards and supporters of our educational environments, it is our task to think critically about the world around us and create new ways to nurture emotionally healthy, empathetic, and civically-engaged young people prepared to succeed in life.

The session topics are keenly focused on end-users, specifically at-risk youth, for whom education, and life, may be atypical and seeks to share tools that address the needs of the users and how we can serve them better. Now is the perfect time to reassess learning spaces and curriculum, intentionally anchoring each with the goals of improved health and wellness. We will address ways in which we can inspire students to have greater awareness, appreciation and ownership of nature, self, and self within nature. We present this session with the whole student approach. Providing green spaces, integrating strategies to hone the mind-body connection, and allowing students agency in their own learning and shaping their environments are four ways in which to address the whole student, all of which we will explore in this session.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:

• Explore several Redwood City School District Community School projects and the opportunities to introduce spaces, amenities, programs and service onto a school campus to provide equitable approaches to serve specific community health and wellness needs.
• Explore the benefits and components of the “Little Yogini’s” curriculum and how to incorporate into your classroom or other educational space
• Explore the principles and benefits of biophilic design and the benefits to health and wellness
• Investigate and verify the tools and concepts discussed to enhance discovery in allowing for engaging questions/answer and conversation between the speakers and the audience.

Speakers:

Mary Ruppenthal, Education Market Sector Leader | Architect, HED
Christina Koneazny, Associate Director, Administration and Educational Outreach, USC Joint Educational Project

---