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School Health Education Study


The School Health Education Study (SHES) was a crucial event in transforming health education as practiced in American public schools. It has been called, "the most significant school health education initiative of the 1960s" and was largely responsible for establishing the value of comprehensive health education rather than separate disease-specific units and in introducing the concept-based approach to education in general. Most health curricula developed since have followed the model set by the SHES in its School Health Curriculum Project.

In 1960 millionaire distiller and philanthropist Samuel Bronfman asked Dr. Granville Larimore, then Deputy Commissioner of the New York State Department of Health and a member of the Joint Committee on Health Problems in Education of the American Medical Association (AMA) and the National Education Association (NEA), to suggest several projects in health or education that should receive funding but were being neglected by governmental and private funders. Dr. Larimore suggested three priorities: (I) graduate medical education, (2) effectiveness of the mass media for health education, and (3) school health education. After hearing presentations on each of these three priorities, the Samuel Bronfman Foundation’s board decided to provide $200,000 for a study of the status of health education in the nation’s schools.

The Study was envisioned as an independent, two-year-long investigation, affiliated with the American Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation (AAHPER) and the National Education Association. Bronfman sought the advice of Delbert Oberteuffer, professor at the Ohio State University and widely regarded as the leading figure in health education at that time, regarding who could best lead the study. Oberteuffer recommended one of his young OSU colleagues, Elena Sliepcevich. Dr. Sliepcevich accepted the appointment and moved to Washington, DC where the SHES leased office space on Dupont Circle in the building next door to the NEA.

During its first year, the Study assessed the state of health education offerings in a total of 135 school systems covering 38 states and involving some 1101 individual elementary schools and 359 secondary schools. This survey remains the broadest of its type ever completed in the United States. In the second year test instruments were administered to students in grades 6, 9, and 12 of the participating schools. Of 17,634 usable answer sheets re¬turned to the researchers, a weighted sample of 2000 scores for each of the three grade levels representative of the makeup of the school sample was selected for analysis. Analysis of the results required a third year of Bronfman Foundation support and led to the conclusion that the state of health education in the nation’s public schools was "appalling".


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