PHAI Online - The Public Health Advocacy Institute
Posts Tagged ‘School Water’
Developing State Policy Recommendations for Safe Drinking Water Procurement in Child Care Centers and Schools
Wednesday, December 20th, 2017
Access to safe and appealing drinking water in child care centers and schools is a key strategy to build healthy habits that children will use for life to maintain a healthy body weight and to support overall health.
This study sought to identify and summarize state-level policies in twenty states for drinking water quality and access in public schools and licensed child care centers. This information was then used to generate individual state profiles and general policy recommendations to achieve increased drinking water consumption by children and to ensure drinking water is safe and appealing.
The guiding principles behind these policy recommendations are to ensure that safe, potable drinking water is made available at no cost to children throughout the day. The state profiles and policy recommendations can be used to assess current policies for drinking water access and quality and to determine which policy recommendations are relevant to the needs of a particular state’s schools and child care centers. The state profiles and policy recommendations also can be used as points of comparison and sources of ideas during the policymaking process.
Download the full report:
Individual state profiles are available as pdf files for the following states:
This work was supported by Healthy Eating Research, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Plumbing codes an important factor in availability of school water fountains, finds PHAI’s Wilking in CDC study
Wednesday, May 7th, 2014
In a study examining availability of water fountains in schools published in the May, 2014 issue of the CDC journal, Preventing Chronic Disease,
PHAI’s senior staff attorney, Cara Wilking, along with CDC researchers, Stephen J. Onufrak and Sohyun Park found that state plumbing codes were a predictor of whether and how many water fountains were available to children.
Because the availability of plain drinking water to schoolchildren is an important strategy to reduce sugary beverage intake of empty calories, understanding the factors that facilitate or frustrate prevalence of water fountains is a key to successful implementation of this strategy.
Citation: Onufrak SJ, Park S, Wilking C. Student-Reported School Drinking Fountain Availability by Youth Characteristics and State Plumbing Codes. Prev Chronic Dis 2014;11:130314. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5888/pcd11.130314
